High RSS sizes for processes

[Conal O'Kelly]

Hi

I've noticed that a number of processes including scopeux (measureware), mib2agt(snmp) & gpm (glanceplus) are consuming large amounts of memory. From glance the RSS values are 205mb for gpm, 221mb for scopeux & 162mb for mib2agt. Normally the values are significantly lower.

Admittedly there is no real problem at the moment as I can quite easily restart measureweare, snmp etc & there is no memory pressure but Im curious as to what could cause this? I've already restarted gpm and now the RSS value is 6.9mb. It had been running continuously for a few days but I can't see this causing a problem.

System is A500, 3GB memory & running HP-UX 11.00.

Any comments/ideas greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Cheers
Con

[Michael Tully]

Looks like there is some sort of memory leak. The first place to look would be patching. How old is your patch bundle software?

[Conal O'Kelly]

Thanks Michael
I guess a memory leak makes sense & I know there has been issues with mib2agt & memory leaks.
The system is patched to the March 2001 patch bundle. This is the same for all our systems but it is only this system that is causing problems.
I can see since I have restarted gpm that its RSS value has increased from 6.9mb to 8.3mb in the space of about 30mins which I guess would point to a memory leak??
Is it normal that I would see an issue on one system with mwa/glance & a potential memory leak but not on others when patch levels & product version etc is exactly the same?

Cheers
Conal

[Bill Hassell]

The mib2agt memory leak is well known and it can grow to many hundreds of megs. There is a specific patch: PHSS_21046 to fix this (and others in the SNMP code). However, if your shop does not run network monitoring software like OpenView's Network Node Manager, then I would disable all the SNMP subsystems. This also solves a security issue with SNMP daemons. To turn off the daemons:

/sbin/init.d/SnmpHpunix stop
/sbin/init.d/SnmpMib2 stop
/sbin/init.d/SnmpTrpDst stop
/sbin/init.d/SnmpMaster stop

Then to keep them off, edit the corresponding config scripts in /tc/rc.config.d: SnmpHpunix, SnmpMib2, SnmpTrpDst and SnmpMaster. Change the enabling variable from =1 to =0.

For Glance and Measureware (and midaemon), every time you patch the system (and Mar 2001 is pretty old), you must load the latest version of Glance and Measureware. These tools are critically dependent on the kernel's structure and if it changes, they can get very slow and use a lot of RAM trying to stay in sync.