[BusyBox] Ash memory question/problem

[Jeff Angielski]

On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 18:26, David Meggy wrote:
> Hi Jeff
> 
> You haven't narrowed your problem down very well at all.  The increase
> use of memory could be from any process in the system, or from the
> kernel.  It is hard to blame busybox, when you don't check the memory
> use of the busybox process.  You can use basic tools like ps or top to
> do this.  Or if you are on a really small embedded system, you can take
> a look at the busybox process directly by running cat on /proc/#/status,
> where # is the process number of busybox.
> 
> David

I was not really blaming Busybox for the problem.  I am just trying to
find out if anybody has seen this problem with the DENX ELDK 2.1 root
filesystem and Busybox.

I agree that it could be any number of things causing the memory leak. 
I just thought it was wierd that with very little running (famous last
words!), "cat /proc/meminfo" shows a 4k loss.  If I put the cat in a
loop, it shows a 4k loss each iteration until we hit the low water mark
for the low mem region.  "free" as well as other commands do the same
thing.

Incidentally, I am using a 2.4.18 kernel. 

I also asked since somebody else had reported similiar findings but I
saw no resolution to the problem:

http://www.busybox.net/lists/busybox/2003-October/009472.html



> On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 13:49, Jeff Angielski wrote:
> > 
> > It would seem that everytime I run a command in the shell I lose another
> > 4k of free memory.  This occurs with the original BusyBox 0.60.1 that
> > comes with the Denx ELDK 2.1 root filesystem (although I am running off
> > a JFFS2 filesystem).  It also occurs with Busybox pre3, pre3, and
> > today's unstable-12/15/2003.
> > 
> > If I do a lot of things on the system I eventually run out of memory and
> > the system comes to it's knees.
> > 
> > I was just wondering if anybody out there using the DENX filesystem and
> > Busybox is experiencing the same behavior.
> > 
> > Here is an example:
> >   
> > # cat /proc/meminfo
> >         total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
> > Mem:  14868480  5894144  8974336        0     4096  2637824
> > Swap:        0        0        0
> > MemTotal:        14520 kB
> > MemFree:          8764 kB  <=================
> > MemShared:           0 kB
> > Buffers:             4 kB
> > Cached:           2576 kB
> > SwapCached:          0 kB
> > Active:           1000 kB
> > Inactive:         3164 kB
> > HighTotal:           0 kB
> > HighFree:            0 kB
> > LowTotal:        14520 kB
> > LowFree:          8764 kB
> > SwapTotal:           0 kB
> > SwapFree:            0 kB
> > # ls
> > bin   dev   etc   ftp   home  lib   proc  sbin  tmp   usr   var
> > # cat /proc/meminfo
> >         total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
> > Mem:  14868480  5902336  8966144        0     4096  2637824
> > Swap:        0        0        0
> > MemTotal:        14520 kB
> > MemFree:          8756 kB  <====================
> > MemShared:           0 kB
> > Buffers:             4 kB
> > Cached:           2576 kB
> > SwapCached:          0 kB
> > Active:           1008 kB
> > Inactive:         3156 kB
> > HighTotal:           0 kB
> > HighFree:            0 kB
> > LowTotal:        14520 kB
> > LowFree:          8756 kB
> > SwapTotal:           0 kB
> > SwapFree:            0 kB
> > #
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > ----
> > 
> 
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