Memory Leak work around

[Mahen]

Hi Everyone,

Just wondering if you have experienced this problem before. One HP box with 10.20, 3.75GB main mem., 6 processors has some apps which have memory leak. Since physical mem. has reached the limit, we can't add anymore.
Since apps. are 10.20 we can't upgrade to 11.x

Due to continued leak, we like to have more memory added until the problem is fixed.

So, my questions are :

1) Any one has used any kind of work around to a situation like this by any means.

2) How can I determine how much is installed in total. Glance shows phys. mem as 3.75. Does this include the 0.25GB kept for kernel.

3) Does it help if more Virtual Memory is allocated.(pardon my ignorance)

Thanks for your time.
Mahen

P.S. This thread has been moved from HP 9000 to HP-UX > sysadmin. -HP Forum Moderator       

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

I would bet that your machine actually has 4GB installed; the 256MB's are simply mapped out for I/O space. The only real answer to your problem is to fix the memory leaks; I never tolerate that from application vendors for any significant period of time; there is simply no excuse for it. In almost every case, your application code will run on 64-bit 11x and that is one answer. It delays the problem but does not fix it.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi again:

I would think your short term answer is to migrate to 64-bit 11x. That way each of your current 32-bit applications could have its own 32-bit address space.

[Bill Hassell]

AS stated, memory leaks are bad code, so identify the leaking process(es) by sorting all the processes by amount of RAM used:

UNIX95= ps -eo vsz,ruser,pid,args | sort -rn | head -20

Change the head -20 to a number large enough to show the interesting processes. Note that processes that waste large amounts of RAM wil cause the system to run very slow. You can fix the problem by killing the offending process(es) but with whatever caveats there are about this action. Randomly killing database processes can have a detrimental effect on the integrity of the database.