SparcStation I Memory Leak? (a possible answer)

[Chet Murthy]

murthy at algron.cs.cornell.edu (Chet Murthy) writes:

>I have been running a large LISP application on a SparcStation I for a
>while now, and I have noticed some really awful problems with the
>allocation of memory as time goes on.

Well, after some talking with a Sun OS ambassador at a new products
session, I found out some interesting stuff.

The phenomenon is called "pmeg stealing".  I'm not sure what's going on,
exactly, but the idea seems to be that somebody in the kernel is stealing
memory from the pool, and not putting it back.  

So it looks like there's less and less.  The fix, from someone who may
choose to remain anonymous (otherwise, he can raise his hand - I didn't
figure this out myself) is to turn off the swapper, leaving only the pager
running:

To turn off swap:

   % su
   # adb -wk /vmunix /dev/mem
   nosched?W 1
   ^D
   # reboot

And I've gotten conflicting reports as to whether it is fixed in 4.1 or
not.  So we'll just have to wait and see...

	murthy at cs.cornell.edu