[AG-TECH] Rat Linux Memory Leak

[Christoph Willing]

On 18/03/2011, at 7:14 PM, Douglas Kosovic wrote:

> Hi Todd,
>
>> I'm running into issues with Rat on Fedora 14.
>>
>> As (I believe) AG still isn't fully supporting F14, I've just been  
>> running rat/vic
>> manually.
>
> Sorry I don't have any PCs running Fedora 14 and as I build the AG  
> RPMs on an OBS-server, I don't have firsthand experience with the  
> F14 issues. But I know some of the issues are related to F14 using  
> the new python-twisted version 10.1 package, several people have  
> reported more reliability by rebuilding  the python-twisted 8.2.0  
> source RPMs from Fedora 12/13 on F14 and installing the generated  
> RPMs.
>
> Once CentOS 6 (which is indirectly based on Fedora 13) becomes  
> available, I'm moving my AG node to CentOS 6. As a consequence, I'm  
> thinking of just maintaining the RHEL/CentOS AG RPMs and not  
> releasing AG RPMs for future versions of Fedora. I've built AG RPMs  
> for RHEL6 (and therefor the unreleased CentOS 6), but haven't put  
> them up yet in the AG yum repository. I should probably also mention  
> I no longer work for UQ Vislab, so haven't got as much time to  
> devote to AG related stuff as I did in the past.
>
>> However, I'm having an issue where rat will slowly eat up all  
>> available
>> memory.
>
> I remember a similar thread in this mailing list from November  
> regarding the memory leak with RAT on Ubuntu 10.10, just found it  
> and here is an extract:
>
> ----
> Here's a summary of test results using code form the svn trunk (r4891)
>
> On a system with no Pulse Audio, both OSS and ALSA available:
>   OSS  selected - uses total 1% cpu, 0.3% mem., irrespective of Talk  
> being on or off
>   ALSA selected - uses total 1% cpu, 0.3% mem., adds about 0.1%  
> every 30mins
>
> On a system with Pulse Audio & ALSA, but no OSS (Ubuntu 10.10)
>   Talk off - uses total 2% cpu, 0.2% mem usage at start, 0.8% after  
> ~2hours
>   Talk on  - uses total 36% cpu, 0.2% mem usage at start, increasing  
> by 0.1% every 3 seconds
>                                  i.e. 30% mem usage after 10 minutes  
> on the test machine.
> ----
>
>> As an aside, I've also found I have to uninstall more than just  
>> alsa-plugins-
>> pulseaudio else I get very high processor usage.
>> (Currenltly I'm completely uninstalling pulse).
>>
>> Suggestions?  Has there been any recent changes?
>
> Disable/remove PulseAudio, enable OSS and use OSS with RAT.  
> Instructions on how to enable OSS can be found in:
>
>   /etc/modprobe.d/dist-oss.conf
>
> RAT's code hasn't been changed in ages.


This has just reminded me of a similar problem that was discussed here:
     https://lists.mcs.anl.gov/mailman/htdig/ag-tech/2010-November/021910.html

To summarise, there were some changes to rat quite a while ago which  
only produce the memory eating symptoms with certain combinations of  
rat and ALSA/Pulse audio etc. To fix the Ubuntu case, I rebuilt the  
rat package with the source code from svn release 4393.

Doug, if you have time, I suggest you build a new rat package using  
r4891 and let Todd test it with F14. There's a 4393 source tarball at:
     http://www.vislab.uq.edu.au/ag3/distfiles/mmedia-r4393.tar.bz2


chris


Christoph Willing                       +61 7 3365 8316
QCIF Access Grid Manager
University of Queensland