find command causes mem problems

[p7]

hi all

has anyone ever seen the find command suck up memory and cause swapping?

thx in advance

[Bill Hassell]

Did you see find process growing larger and larger? Or was this condition the result of other commands strung together such as xargs? To see the size of all the processes, you can use this command (copy/paste as shown):

UNIX95=1 ps -e -o vsz,pid,ppid,args | sort -rn | head -20

This will show the largest processes. Run it several times to see if some are growing larger.

[Ismail Azad]

Did you terminate the loop with + for the find command?

[Dennis Handly]

Do you have your buffer cache too big?

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Pasquale:

What's chicken and what's egg?

That is, are you monitoring performance before starting the find() or is your find() taking longer than you expected and *then* you see performance issues?

How are you measuring swapping? What values do you see when find() isn't running and what values do you see when it is. Page-in activity is immaterial. What matters is the page-out values as reported by 'vmstat'.

If you post the *exact* find() command (in full) that you are using, we might be able to provide some better commentary.

Too, give us an idea of the number (if only in orders of magnitude) of items that find() traverses. That is, are you only searching a directory like '/etc' or are you searching something like '/var' on a heavily patched system?

Regards!

...JRF...