# memory leak issue?

**URL:** <https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080>\
**Category:** SLES Configure-Administer\
**Created:** [July 21, 2017, 10:54pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080 "2017-07-21T22:54:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 20\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![alpha754293](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@alpha754293](https://forums.suse.com/u/alpha754293)\
**Post date:** [July 21, 2017, 10:54pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/1 "2017-07-21T22:54:31Z")

</div>

I’m not sure if anybody have this issue, but I am running some computer aided engineering analysis and when I run the same analysis in Windows, I know that the analysis doesn’t require more than 70 GB of RAM. But here, you can see that not only has it consumed all 128 GB of RAM that I have installed on my system, but it is also requiring or using almost 100 GB of swap.

Any ideas on what I can do to try and investigate this further? This shouldn’t be happening.

![](https://s4.postimg.org/l9tqb44jh/Capture.png)

Thanks.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ab1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d2c977/32.png) [@ab1](https://forums.suse.com/u/ab1)\
**Post date:** [July 22, 2017, 2:38am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/2 "2017-07-22T02:38:12Z")

</div>

You are not showing us anything about the process, so there is not much  
help we can provide about why the process may be different other than it  
may be coded differently on Linux.

On the other hand, if you can post the output from something like ‘free’  
and ‘ps’ then we may be able to see a lot better.

```auto
free
ps aux | grep yourProcessNameHere
```

To provide some background, Linux uses as much RAM as it can for various  
things, including filesystem caching, because RAM that is not being used  
is a waste of RAM. It does so in a way such that if anything needs the  
RAM, the filesystem cache data can be flushed instantly (it is just a copy  
of what is on those slower disks anyway, so no need to write/save it) and  
then RAM or other virtual memory can be allocated directly to whatever  
process. The pictures you shared do not show anything about the process,  
though, just the system, and if you look at RAM used on most systems that  
have been up for a while, it is normal to have high RAM usage, because  
that means the system is optimizing filesystem reads by caching as much as  
it can as mentioned above. Doing otherwise would mean every bit of disk  
I/O needs to go to the disks, and disks are slower than RAM, so it’s a  
waste of RAM and a penalty of slow performance.

–  
Good luck.

If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
show your appreciation and click on the star below.

If you want to send me a private message, please let me know in the  
forum as I do not use the web interface often.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![alpha754293](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@alpha754293](https://forums.suse.com/u/alpha754293)\
**Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 7:49pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/3 "2017-07-26T19:49:47Z")

</div>

[QUOTE=ab;38845]You are not showing us anything about the process, so there is not much  
help we can provide about why the process may be different other than it  
may be coded differently on Linux.

On the other hand, if you can post the output from something like ‘free’  
and ‘ps’ then we may be able to see a lot better.

```auto
free
ps aux | grep yourProcessNameHere
```

To provide some background, Linux uses as much RAM as it can for various  
things, including filesystem caching, because RAM that is not being used  
is a waste of RAM. It does so in a way such that if anything needs the  
RAM, the filesystem cache data can be flushed instantly (it is just a copy  
of what is on those slower disks anyway, so no need to write/save it) and  
then RAM or other virtual memory can be allocated directly to whatever  
process. The pictures you shared do not show anything about the process,  
though, just the system, and if you look at RAM used on most systems that  
have been up for a while, it is normal to have high RAM usage, because  
that means the system is optimizing filesystem reads by caching as much as  
it can as mentioned above. Doing otherwise would mean every bit of disk  
I/O needs to go to the disks, and disks are slower than RAM, so it’s a  
waste of RAM and a penalty of slow performance.

–  
Good luck.

If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
show your appreciation and click on the star below.

If you want to send me a private message, please let me know in the  
forum as I do not use the web interface often.[/QUOTE]

So here are the outputs for the various data requests:

![](https://s1.postimg.org/5w812rlhr/free.png)

My apologies in advance that some of the outputs are only available in picture form (I am at work and so I am remotely logging into my system via two other systems so trying to get console outputs back out of it is a big of an involved process, especially while the system is busy).

Note that the memory usage has changed somewhat in that now it is using 84.5% of swap as well.

```auto
ewen@aes:/export/home/work> ps aux | grep ansys
ewen 3863 0.5 0.1 821208 144284 ? Ssl Jul13 111:35 /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/linx64/ansysli_server
ewen 3875 0.0 0.0 19064 2728 ? Ss Jul13 4:52 /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/linx64/ansysli_monitor -monitor 3863 -restart_port_timeout 15
ewen 3909 0.0 0.0 16780 324 ? S Jul13 0:11 /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/linx64/lmgrd -c /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/license_files -l /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/license.log
ewen 3910 0.0 0.0 127744 4132 ? Ssl Jul13 5:14 ansyslmd -T aes3 11.13 3 -c :/usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/license_files: -srv l5cxNrODVadTCxS0jQ7tWv8TYnSz5DAH18P1AGpaG159HHZakpuDbaQFd5y2xys --lmgrd_start 59675cee -vdrestart 0
ewen 20492 0.0 0.0 13588 8 pts/1 S+ Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansys180 -b -dis -np 16 -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20573 0.0 0.0 11664 12 pts/1 S+ Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/commonfiles/MPI/Intel/5.1.3.223/linx64/bin/mpirun -np 16 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20578 0.0 0.0 15884 80 pts/1 S+ Jul23 0:00 mpiexec.hydra -np 16 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20579 0.0 0.0 15080 84 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/commonfiles/MPI/Intel/5.1.3.223/linx64/bin//pmi_proxy --control-port aes3:30544 --pmi-connect lazy-cache --pmi-aggregate -s 0 --rmk user --launcher ssh --demux poll --pgid 0 --enable-stdin 1 --retries 10 --control-code 2025298722 --usize -2 --proxy-id 0
ewen 20584 0.0 0.0 12068 12 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20585 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20586 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20587 0.0 0.0 12068 12 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20588 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20589 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20590 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20591 0.0 0.0 12068 12 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20592 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20593 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20594 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20595 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20596 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20597 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20598 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20599 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21525 16.7 0.8 1806700 1119284 pts/1 D Jul23 835:17 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21526 24.6 0.8 1831432 1165844 pts/1 D Jul23 1230:37 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21527 24.9 0.8 1820004 1063972 pts/1 D Jul23 1245:20 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21528 27.9 0.8 1828340 1162440 pts/1 D Jul23 1393:09 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21529 20.6 0.8 1819800 1148656 pts/1 D Jul23 1028:41 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21530 29.2 0.8 1823580 1159404 pts/1 D Jul23 1456:34 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21531 31.0 0.8 1833948 1069276 pts/1 D Jul23 1549:13 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21532 14.6 0.8 1832976 1177016 pts/1 D Jul23 731:57 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21533 14.2 0.9 1821168 1193096 pts/1 D Jul23 708:33 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21534 21.5 0.8 1812292 1156464 pts/1 D Jul23 1076:28 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21535 20.0 0.8 1817180 1137240 pts/1 D Jul23 1001:25 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21536 13.9 0.8 1814668 1171884 pts/1 D Jul23 692:48 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21537 19.7 0.8 1833108 1173808 pts/1 D Jul23 985:43 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21538 12.5 0.8 1818804 1164852 pts/1 D Jul23 626:14 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21539 18.5 0.8 1816904 1137332 pts/1 D Jul23 924:21 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21546 13.9 0.9 4649080 1213380 pts/1 Dl Jul23 696:38 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 25771 0.0 0.0 10496 936 pts/3 S+ 12:15 0:00 grep --color=auto ansys
```

That’s the output from the ps output.

Hopefully you will be able to decipher that better than I can. (I have SOME idea of what it is saying, but not a full/complete idea of what it is saying, especially in the absence of the column headers.)

But with the very tiny bit of knowledge that I do have, it looks like that the memory (looks like 4th column, %MEM) is very low for each of the processes (e.g. \< 1.0%). Given that, I am not sure why SLES doesn’t seem to be releasing the RAM back to the application, and instead, ends up seemingly forcing the app to use swap rather than RAM.

And here is the output for all processes:

```auto
ewen@aes3:/export/home/work> ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.0 34232 2460 ? Ss Jul13 3:17 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --switched-root --system --deserialize 21
root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:03 [kthreadd]
root 3 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:16 [ksoftirqd/0]
root 5 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/0:0H]
root 8 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [migration/0]
root 9 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [rcu_bh]
root 10 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 8:34 [rcu_sched]
root 11 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/0]
root 12 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/1]
root 13 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:03 [migration/1]
root 14 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:03 [ksoftirqd/1]
root 16 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/1:0H]
root 17 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/2]
root 18 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:01 [migration/2]
root 19 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:03 [ksoftirqd/2]
root 21 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/2:0H]
root 22 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/3]
root 23 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:01 [migration/3]
root 24 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:17 [ksoftirqd/3]
root 26 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/3:0H]
root 27 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/4]
root 28 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [migration/4]
root 29 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:04 [ksoftirqd/4]
root 31 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/4:0H]
root 32 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/5]
root 33 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [migration/5]
root 34 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:01 [ksoftirqd/5]
root 36 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/5:0H]
root 37 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/6]
root 38 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [migration/6]
root 39 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:01 [ksoftirqd/6]
root 41 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/6:0H]
root 42 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/7]
root 43 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [migration/7]
root 44 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:01 [ksoftirqd/7]
root 46 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/7:0H]
root 47 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/8]
root 48 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:03 [migration/8]
root 49 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:11 [ksoftirqd/8]
root 51 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/8:0H]
root 53 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/9]
root 54 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:04 [migration/9]
root 55 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:04 [ksoftirqd/9]
root 57 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/9:0H]
root 58 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/10]
root 59 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:01 [migration/10]
root 60 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:05 [ksoftirqd/10]
root 62 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/10:0H]
root 63 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/11]
root 64 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:01 [migration/11]
root 65 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:04 [ksoftirqd/11]
root 67 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/11:0H]
root 68 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/12]
root 69 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:01 [migration/12]
root 70 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:03 [ksoftirqd/12]
root 72 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/12:0H]
root 73 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/13]
root 74 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:01 [migration/13]
root 75 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:03 [ksoftirqd/13]
root 77 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/13:0H]
root 78 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/14]
root 79 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:01 [migration/14]
root 80 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:03 [ksoftirqd/14]
root 82 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/14:0H]
root 83 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:02 [watchdog/15]
root 84 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:01 [migration/15]
root 85 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:03 [ksoftirqd/15]
root 87 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/15:0H]
root 88 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [khelper]
root 89 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [kdevtmpfs]
root 90 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [netns]
root 91 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [perf]
root 92 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [writeback]
root 93 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kintegrityd]
root 94 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [bioset]
root 95 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [crypto]
root 96 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kblockd]
root 103 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:40 [kworker/13:1]
root 104 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kgraft]
root 105 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [khungtaskd]
root 106 0.8 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 158:54 [kswapd0]
root 107 0.6 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 122:36 [kswapd1]
root 108 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SN Jul13 0:00 [ksmd]
root 109 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SN Jul13 0:44 [khugepaged]
root 110 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [fsnotify_mark]
root 120 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kthrotld]
root 129 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kpsmoused]
root 130 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [print/0]
root 131 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [print/1]
root 151 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [deferwq]
root 187 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [kauditd]
root 300 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [ata_sff]
root 304 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [khubd]
root 325 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [scsi_eh_0]
root 328 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [scsi_tmf_0]
root 341 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [scsi_wq_0]
root 350 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [ttm_swap]
root 352 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:01 [scsi_eh_1]
root 353 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [scsi_tmf_1]
root 354 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [scsi_eh_2]
root 355 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [scsi_tmf_2]
root 356 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [scsi_eh_3]
root 357 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [scsi_tmf_3]
root 358 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [scsi_eh_4]
root 359 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [scsi_tmf_4]
root 360 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [scsi_eh_5]
root 361 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [scsi_tmf_5]
root 362 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [scsi_eh_6]
root 363 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [scsi_tmf_6]
root 388 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:15 [kworker/9:1H]
root 389 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/0:1H]
root 395 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [bioset]
root 407 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:14 [kworker/10:1H]
root 413 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-genwork-1]
root 414 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 2:05 [btrfs-submit-1]
root 415 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-delalloc-]
root 416 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-fixup-1]
root 419 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-rmw-1]
root 420 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-endio-rai]
root 421 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 423 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:08 [btrfs-freespace]
root 425 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-cache-1]
root 426 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-readahead]
root 428 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-qgroup-re]
root 429 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:24 [btrfs-cleaner]
root 430 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 8:10 [btrfs-transacti]
root 499 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:16 [kworker/11:1H]
root 500 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:13 [kworker/12:1H]
root 501 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:12 [kworker/13:1H]
root 502 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:13 [kworker/14:1H]
root 518 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:17 [kworker/15:1H]
root 519 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:17 [kworker/8:1H]
root 533 0.0 0.0 21732 32 ? Ss Jul13 0:23 /sbin/dmeventd -f
root 549 0.0 0.0 42772 8 ? Ss Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-udevd
root 765 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [edac-poller]
root 767 0.0 0.0 12032 664 ? Ss Jul13 6:21 /usr/sbin/haveged -w 1024 -v 0 -F
root 995 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kvm-irqfd-clean]
root 1201 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul20 0:15 [kworker/6:0]
root 1498 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul23 0:00 [kworker/0:2]
root 1797 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SN Jul13 0:00 [kipmi0]
root 1855 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-genwork-1]
root 1856 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 7:42 [btrfs-submit-1]
root 1857 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-delalloc-]
root 1858 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-fixup-1]
root 1861 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-rmw-1]
root 1862 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-endio-rai]
root 1863 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 1865 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:09 [btrfs-freespace]
root 1867 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-cache-1]
root 1868 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-readahead]
root 1869 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-flush_del]
root 1870 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 [btrfs-qgroup-re]
root 1875 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:11 [btrfs-cleaner]
root 1876 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 10:16 [btrfs-transacti]
message+ 2068 0.0 0.0 42928 1096 ? SLs Jul13 0:10 /bin/dbus-daemon --system --address=systemd: --nofork --nopidfile --systemd-activation
avahi 2071 0.0 0.0 28188 492 ? Ss Jul13 2:18 avahi-daemon: running [aes3.local]
root 2073 0.0 0.0 24964 456 ? Ss Jul13 0:01 /usr/sbin/smartd -n
root 2076 0.0 0.0 19304 432 ? Ss Jul13 1:39 /usr/sbin/irqbalance --foreground
nscd 2079 0.0 0.0 1005124 680 ? Ssl Jul13 3:09 /usr/sbin/nscd
root 2080 0.0 0.0 29544 508 ? SLs Jul13 1:00 /usr/lib/wicked/bin/wickedd-dhcp6 --systemd --foreground
root 2081 0.0 0.0 29488 436 ? SLs Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/wicked/bin/wickedd-dhcp4 --systemd --foreground
root 2094 0.0 0.0 29488 40 ? SLs Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/wicked/bin/wickedd-auto4 --systemd --foreground
root 2102 0.0 0.0 20052 12 ? Ss Jul13 0:00 /usr/sbin/mcelog --ignorenodev --daemon --foreground
root 2127 0.0 0.0 20096 224 ? Ss Jul13 0:06 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-logind
root 2129 0.0 0.0 4440 8 tty1 Ss+ Jul13 0:00 /sbin/agetty --noclear tty1 linux
root 2136 0.0 0.0 337852 340 ? SLsl Jul13 0:53 /usr/sbin/rsyslogd -n
root 2147 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:04 [kworker/4:1H]
root 2148 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/2:1H]
root 2153 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/6:1H]
root 2157 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/7:1H]
root 2158 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 1:34 [kworker/3:1H]
root 2160 0.0 0.0 198308 0 ? SLl Jul13 0:00 /usr/sbin/gdm
root 2161 0.0 0.0 29612 556 ? SLs Jul13 1:00 /usr/sbin/wickedd --systemd --foreground
root 2179 0.0 0.0 279528 40 ? SLl Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/gdm/gdm-simple-slave --display-id /org/gnome/DisplayManager/Displays/_0
root 2180 0.0 0.0 29644 296 ? SLs Jul13 0:00 /usr/sbin/wickedd-nanny --systemd --foreground
root 2185 0.1 0.0 422644 3176 ? Ssl Jul13 34:31 /usr/bin/python -Es /usr/sbin/tuned -l -P
root 2202 9.5 82.5 333977404 109037892 tty7 Ssl+ Jul13 1818:03 /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -background none -verbose -auth /run/gdm/auth-for-gdm-Ogxqa9/database -seat seat0 -nolisten tcp vt7
root 2203 0.0 0.0 274900 648 ? SLsl Jul13 0:02 /usr/lib/accounts-daemon
polkitd 2215 0.0 0.0 517876 1308 ? SLsl Jul13 0:03 /usr/lib/polkit-1/polkitd --no-debug
root 2248 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul25 0:00 [kworker/5:2]
root 2335 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/5:1H]
root 2655 0.0 0.0 223560 408 ? Ssl Jul13 0:02 /usr/lib/upower/upowerd
root 2685 0.0 0.0 31624 4 ? Ss Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --user
root 2686 0.0 0.0 64284 736 ? S Jul13 0:00 (sd-pam)
rtkit 2796 0.0 0.0 174260 64 ? SNLsl Jul13 0:09 /usr/lib/rtkit/rtkit-daemon
root 3001 0.0 0.0 240744 400 ? SLl Jul13 0:03 gdm-session-worker [pam/gdm-password]
root 3199 0.0 0.0 437608 48 ? SLsl Jul13 0:00 /usr/sbin/libvirtd --listen
root 3232 0.0 0.0 47108 4 ? Ss Jul13 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd -D
root 3309 0.0 0.0 19608 276 ? Ss Jul13 0:21 /usr/lib/postfix/master -w
postfix 3311 0.0 0.0 21856 164 ? S Jul13 3:01 qmgr -l -t fifo -u
root 3337 0.0 0.0 18820 112 ? Ss Jul13 1:30 /usr/sbin/cron -n
root 3340 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul21 0:00 [btrfs-flush_del]
ewen 3485 0.0 0.0 31836 12 ? Ss Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --user
ewen 3486 0.0 0.0 64284 568 ? S Jul13 0:00 (sd-pam)
ewen 3489 0.0 0.0 289704 140 ? Sl Jul13 0:00 /usr/bin/gnome-keyring-daemon --daemonize --login
ewen 3492 0.0 0.0 542316 828 ? SLsl Jul13 0:01 /usr/bin/gnome-session --session sle-classic
ewen 3541 0.0 0.0 14048 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-launch --sh-syntax --close-stderr --exit-with-session /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc --session sle-classic
ewen 3542 0.0 0.0 34532 656 ? Ss Jul13 0:00 /bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session
ewen 3545 0.0 0.0 335312 216 ? Sl Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/at-spi2/at-spi-bus-launcher
ewen 3549 0.0 0.0 34092 388 ? SL Jul13 0:00 /bin/dbus-daemon --config-file=/etc/at-spi2/accessibility.conf --nofork --print-address 3
ewen 3552 0.0 0.0 122904 456 ? Sl Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/at-spi2/at-spi2-registryd --use-gnome-session
ewen 3558 0.0 0.0 860844 3136 ? SLl Jul13 3:03 /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon-3.0/gnome-settings-daemon
ewen 3573 0.0 0.0 182000 360 ? Sl Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd
ewen 3578 0.0 0.0 336912 0 ? Sl Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs//gvfsd-fuse /run/user/1000/gvfs -f -o big_writes
ewen 3593 0.0 0.0 178132 568 ? Sl Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/dconf-service
ewen 3599 0.0 0.0 296900 1280 ? SLl Jul13 0:10 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor
ewen 3602 0.0 0.0 291624 1608 ? Sl Jul13 0:01 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start
root 3605 0.0 0.0 361336 3936 ? SLsl Jul13 3:25 /usr/lib/udisks2/udisksd --no-debug
ewen 3616 0.0 0.0 185980 676 ? Sl Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-mtp-volume-monitor
ewen 3620 0.0 0.0 198132 632 ? Sl Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor
ewen 3624 0.0 0.0 181940 504 ? Sl Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-goa-volume-monitor
ewen 3629 0.0 0.0 395640 0 ? Sl Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon-3.0/gsd-printer
ewen 3640 34.0 0.1 2132728 193624 ? SLl Jul13 6472:38 /usr/bin/gnome-shell
ewen 3665 0.0 0.0 829880 7124 ? Sl Jul13 0:04 nautilus --no-default-window --force-desktop
ewen 3673 0.0 0.0 41252 296 ? S Jul13 0:02 /usr/lib/GConf/2/gconfd-2
ewen 3676 0.0 0.0 336056 252 ? Sl Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-trash --spawner :1.6 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/0
ewen 3692 0.0 0.0 110188 0 ? Sl Jul13 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-metadata
ewen 3702 3.8 0.0 554464 123804 ? Sl Jul13 722:51 gnome-system-monitor
ewen 3725 0.0 0.0 414824 7616 ? Sl Jul13 1:03 /usr/lib/gnome-terminal-server
ewen 3728 0.0 0.0 6680 0 ? S Jul13 0:00 gnome-pty-helper
ewen 3730 0.0 0.0 14752 0 pts/0 Ss Jul13 0:00 /bin/bash
ewen 3756 0.0 0.0 14752 12 pts/1 Ss Jul13 0:00 bash
ewen 3863 0.5 0.1 821208 144144 ? Ssl Jul13 111:45 /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/linx64/ansysli_server
ewen 3875 0.0 0.0 19064 2488 ? Ss Jul13 4:52 /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/linx64/ansysli_monitor -monitor 3863 -restart_port_timeout 15
ewen 3909 0.0 0.0 16780 412 ? S Jul13 0:11 /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/linx64/lmgrd -c /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/license_files -l /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/license.log
ewen 3910 0.0 0.0 127744 4060 ? Ssl Jul13 5:14 ansyslmd -T aes3 11.13 3 -c :/usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/license_files: -srv l5cxNrODVadTCxS0jQ7tWv8TYnSz5DAH18P1AGpaG159HHZakpuDbaQFd5y2xys --lmgrd_start 59675cee -vdrestart 0
root 3958 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul19 0:00 [btrfs-delayed-m]
root 5145 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul21 0:00 [kworker/2:1]
root 5487 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul15 0:32 [kworker/10:2]
root 5558 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul13 0:00 [kworker/1:1H]
root 6106 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul21 0:00 [kworker/8:1]
root 8106 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul21 0:00 [kworker/11:1]
root 8476 0.1 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul25 1:12 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 8947 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul25 0:00 [kworker/3:2]
root 11644 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul25 0:00 [kworker/6:2]
ewen 11653 0.0 0.0 14860 376 pts/2 Ss+ Jul13 0:00 bash
root 11744 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul20 0:17 [kworker/9:1]
root 12037 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul21 0:13 [kworker/1:1]
ewen 12381 0.0 0.0 30152 4 pts/0 S+ Jul21 0:00 vi run_all_linux.sh
root 12400 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 06:42 0:00 [kworker/14:1]
root 12935 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:44 [kworker/15:2]
root 13267 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul21 0:13 [kworker/3:0]
root 13308 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul18 0:23 [kworker/11:2]
root 13607 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul21 0:13 [kworker/4:2]
root 15196 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul21 0:15 [kworker/8:0]
root 15766 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul14 1:19 [kworker/0:0]
ewen 16347 0.0 0.0 338392 0 ? Sl Jul15 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-network --spawner :1.6 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/1
ewen 16353 0.0 0.0 610480 0 ? SLl Jul15 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-smb-browse --spawner :1.6 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/2
ewen 16360 0.0 0.0 264480 124 ? Sl Jul15 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-dnssd --spawner :1.6 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/3
ewen 16422 0.0 0.0 593760 0 ? SLl Jul15 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-smb --spawner :1.6 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/4
ewen 16988 0.0 0.0 14756 1224 pts/3 Ss Jul15 0:00 bash
root 18357 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul21 0:00 [kworker/4:0]
root 18651 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul21 0:00 [kworker/7:1]
ewen 18790 0.0 0.0 13064 8 pts/1 S+ Jul15 0:00 /bin/bash ./run_all_linux.sh
root 19230 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:40 [kworker/14:0]
root 19629 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul23 0:00 [kworker/15:0]
root 19772 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul25 0:00 [kworker/1:2]
ewen 20492 0.0 0.0 13588 8 pts/1 S+ Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansys180 -b -dis -np 16 -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20573 0.0 0.0 11664 12 pts/1 S+ Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/commonfiles/MPI/Intel/5.1.3.223/linx64/bin/mpirun -np 16 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20578 0.0 0.0 15884 80 pts/1 S+ Jul23 0:00 mpiexec.hydra -np 16 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20579 0.0 0.0 15080 84 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/commonfiles/MPI/Intel/5.1.3.223/linx64/bin//pmi_proxy --control-port aes3:30544 --pmi-connect lazy-cache --pmi-aggregate -s 0 --rmk user --launcher ssh --demux poll --pgid 0 --enable-stdin 1 --retries 10 --control-code 2025298722 --usize -2 --proxy-id 0
ewen 20584 0.0 0.0 12068 12 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20585 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20586 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20587 0.0 0.0 12068 12 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20588 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20589 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20590 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20591 0.0 0.0 12068 12 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20592 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20593 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20594 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20595 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20596 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20597 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20598 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 20599 0.0 0.0 12068 8 pts/1 S Jul23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
root 20690 0.0 0.0 43272 3052 ? SLs Jul20 0:03 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journald
root 21038 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul22 0:00 [kworker/13:2]
ewen 21525 16.7 1.2 2352840 1660180 pts/1 R Jul23 838:04 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21526 24.7 0.8 1831432 1160708 pts/1 R Jul23 1241:05 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21527 25.0 0.8 1820004 1058728 pts/1 R Jul23 1254:05 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21528 28.0 0.8 1828340 1157580 pts/1 R Jul23 1405:51 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21529 20.7 0.8 1819800 1143624 pts/1 R Jul23 1037:44 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21530 29.2 0.8 1823580 1154252 pts/1 R Jul23 1466:07 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21531 31.0 0.8 1833948 1064500 pts/1 R Jul23 1556:51 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21532 14.7 0.8 1832976 1172316 pts/1 R Jul23 738:11 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21533 14.1 0.8 1821168 1187684 pts/1 D Jul23 711:15 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21534 21.6 0.8 1812292 1151712 pts/1 R Jul23 1082:52 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21535 20.0 0.8 1817180 1133068 pts/1 R Jul23 1005:37 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21536 13.8 0.8 1814668 1166372 pts/1 D Jul23 696:29 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21537 19.7 0.8 1833108 1168656 pts/1 D Jul23 988:22 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21538 12.5 1.2 2344204 1684812 pts/1 D Jul23 627:32 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21539 18.5 0.8 1816904 1132604 pts/1 R Jul23 928:55 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
ewen 21546 13.9 1.2 4649080 1665120 pts/1 Dl Jul23 698:08 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.20492 -b -dis -dir LHD_as_is_direct
root 21650 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul24 0:00 [kworker/12:0]
root 22015 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul21 0:04 [kworker/u32:2]
root 23113 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul24 0:00 [kworker/9:0]
root 23153 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul21 0:00 [kworker/10:1]
root 23193 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul13 0:42 [kworker/2:2]
root 23802 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:01 0:02 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 24116 2.6 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:03 1:02 [btrfs-endio-3]
root 25545 0.1 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:14 0:02 [btrfs-worker-4]
root 25687 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:15 0:00 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 25707 0.2 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:15 0:03 [kworker/u33:1]
root 25713 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul21 0:13 [kworker/5:0]
root 26533 0.2 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:20 0:03 [kworker/u34:2]
root 27013 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:23 0:00 [btrfs-endio-4]
root 28008 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:30 0:00 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 28018 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:30 0:00 [kworker/u34:0]
root 28027 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:30 0:00 [kworker/u33:0]
postfix 28394 0.0 0.0 21464 784 ? S 12:33 0:00 pickup -l -t fifo -u
root 28400 0.2 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:33 0:01 [btrfs-endio-2]
root 28555 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:34 0:00 [btrfs-endio-4]
root 28679 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:35 0:00 [btrfs-endio-6]
root 28964 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:37 0:00 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 29195 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:39 0:00 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 29578 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:41 0:00 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 29579 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:41 0:00 [btrfs-endio-4]
ewen 29728 8.8 0.0 26696 1868 pts/3 RL+ 12:43 0:00 ps aux
root 30116 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul22 0:03 [btrfs-worker-6]
root 30517 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul22 0:30 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 31193 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul20 0:15 [kworker/12:2]
root 31858 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul16 0:05 [kworker/u32:0]
root 32337 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul20 0:17 [kworker/7:2]
root 32501 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul22 0:00 [btrfs-delayed-m]
```

Two things:

1. if I am reading this correctly, it tells me that my analysis application (total across all 16 processes) should be consuming a total 17934282752 bytes of memory or about 16.7026 GiB.

2. I don’t understand why the Xorg process (PID 2202) is consuming 82.5% of memory.

This is a fresh install BTW.

```auto
ewen@aes3:/export/home/work> uptime
 12:47 pm up 13 days 5:05, 6 users, load average: 17.04, 17.47, 17.75
```

Any additional advice would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. I didn’t know that I needed to include the outputs of ‘free’ and ‘ps aux’. I’ve never even heard of ‘ps aux’ before. Thanks.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![alpha754293](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@alpha754293](https://forums.suse.com/u/alpha754293)\
**Post date:** [August 6, 2017, 7:43am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/4 "2017-08-06T07:43:58Z")

</div>

Bump.

Anybody have any ideas or suggestions as to why Xorg would take up so much RAM?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ab1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d2c977/32.png) [@ab1](https://forums.suse.com/u/ab1)\
**Post date:** [August 7, 2017, 10:55pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/5 "2017-08-07T22:55:25Z")

</div>

This is a ridiculous outlier:

```auto
root 2202 9.5 82.5 333977404 109037892 tty7 Ssl+ Jul13 1818:03
/usr/bin/Xorg :0 -background none -verbose -auth
/run/gdm/auth-for-gdm-Ogxqa9/database -seat seat0 -nolisten tcp vt7
```

Xorg should not be using this much RSS (109037892 = 109 GB), and the VSZ  
number also sems unreasonably huge.

With that said, Gnome’s gnome-shell process is also a bit suspicious:

```auto
ewen 3640 34.0 0.1 2132728 193624 ? SLl Jul13 6472:38
/usr/bin/gnome-shell
```

All of this leads me to ask: what are you doing in the GUI? Have you  
tried just closing that, going back to runlevel three (3) or  
multi-user.target on systemd, and seeing if that helps your system’s  
performance, at least in terms of memory?

```auto
#SLES 12 and later:
sudo /usr/bin/systemctl multi-user.target

#SLES 11 and earlier:
sudo init 3
```

This will close the GUI, so be sure you are connected (or able to connect)  
another way.

My only guess at why you may see huge amounts of memory may be that  
something about your application is sending something incredible to X in a  
way that is causing it to behave badly by trying to use that much RAM.  
Every place I have seen these kinds of applications doing serious  
number-crunching for engineering, though, they have been Command Line  
Interface (CLI) tools, not big GUI monsters, so I presume you can SSH in,  
run them, and then get results out some other way than by staring at a  
graphical interface. Is that accurate with your environment too?

–  
Good luck.

If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
show your appreciation and click on the star below.

If you want to send me a private message, please let me know in the  
forum as I do not use the web interface often.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![alpha754293](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@alpha754293](https://forums.suse.com/u/alpha754293)\
**Post date:** [August 8, 2017, 2:07am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/6 "2017-08-08T02:07:55Z")

</div>

`
All of this leads me to ask: what are you doing in the GUI? Have you tried just closing that, going back to runlevel three (3) ormulti-user.target on systemd, and seeing if that helps your system's performance, at least in terms of memory?`  
I am launching the analysis via the graphical user interface of the application in order to assess its performance – that way if there is future work that I would want to or need to run in the GUI, I would have an idea in terms of its performance.

If I want it to be a solver-only, such that it eliminates the need for run level 5, that still begs the question why is it even doing this AT run level 5, such that one of the suggested workaround (it isn’t a fix) is to switch the default run level from 5 to 3?

`
Every place I have seen these kinds of applications doing serious number-crunching for engineering, though, they have been Command Line Interface (CLI) tools, not big GUI monsters, so I presume you can SSH in, run them, and then get results out some other way than by staring at a graphical interface. Is that accurate with your environment too?`

Not sure about the first part of your question/statement re: application’s interface to X. My initial assumption would be that there shouldn’t be anything that’s significantly different in the application’s code base because the same application is also used on the Windows platform, and therefore; I can only surmise that if there was a memory leak issue on account of the application itself (causing X to consume large amounts of memory), that it might be also evident in Windows as well. Furthermore; SLES is one of the certified operating systems for the application, and therefore; I further surmise that it wouldn’t have been certified for use if this was such a major issue for the application such that the application is the cause of it.

In regards to your second point - I have addressed it in part in my response above. But to further expand on that, yes, most HPC installations would use this as a solver-only configuration, but there are also some other HPC installations that would allow you to VPN into the HPC cluster itself so that you can do large pre- and post-processing on the HPC (because those systems will typically have more memory than your typical high-end workstation).

I forget if I have ssh remote access configured for the system, but if I need to, that isn’t difficult to set up.

I will need to do some research so that it will mount an smb share (from a Windows server) perpetually on startup, and I also reckon that getting it to auto-log in at run level 3 should also be something that can be done, and isn’t particularly difficult to do.

I can definitely try conducting tests at run level 3 to see if the memory issue still persists, but I still don’t really fully understand why it happened in the first place.

And I might be able to make that switch to run level 3 as the default permanently, but I would prefer not to if I don’t necessarily have to.

Thanks.

_edit_  
Update:

1. I don’t know if the SuSE Forums is having an issue, but it appears that it lost my original reply. Not sure what happened there.

2. For some reason, when I tried to type in sudo /usr/bin/systemctl multi-user.target, it says that it doesn’t know what “multi-user.target” is or what it means. Not sure why.

3. Also interestingly enough, sudo init 3 worked, and so I am re-running the tests right now to see what will happen.

However, to me, the question still exists - why should/would X be doing this thing with the memory in the first place given the statements that I had written above.

Thanks.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ab1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d2c977/32.png) [@ab1](https://forums.suse.com/u/ab1)\
**Post date:** [August 8, 2017, 5:35am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/7 "2017-08-08T05:35:01Z")

</div>

On 08/07/2017 05:14 PM, alpha754293 wrote:[color=blue]

> ## Code:
> 
> ## All of this leads me to ask: what are you doing in the GUI? Have you tried just closing that, going back to runlevel three (3) ormulti-user.target on systemd, and seeing if that helps your system’s performance, at least in terms of memory?
> 
> I am launching the analysis via the graphical user interface of the  
> application in order to assess its performance – that way if there is  
> future work that I would want to or need to run in the GUI, I would have  
> an idea in terms of its performance.
> 
> If I want it to be a solver-only, such that it eliminates the need for  
> run level 5, that still begs the question why is it even doing this AT  
> run level 5, such that one of the suggested workaround (it isn’t a fix)  
> is to switch the default run level from 5 to 3?[/color]

I do not know what X is doing to use that much memory. It could be an  
Xorg bug I suppose, but wow what a bug to just chew through that much  
memory. It would be interesting to know what kind of application it is  
that is doing this, and how it causes X to use that much memory.  
[color=blue]

> ## Code:
> 
> ## Every place I have seen these kinds of applications doing serious number-crunching for engineering, though, they have been Command Line Interface (CLI) tools, not big GUI monsters, so I presume you can SSH in, run them, and then get results out some other way than by staring at a graphical interface. Is that accurate with your environment too?
> 
> Not sure about the first part of your question/statement re:  
> application’s interface to X. My initial assumption would be that there  
> shouldn’t be anything that’s significantly different in the  
> application’s code base because the same application is also used on the  
> Windows platform, and therefore; I can only surmise that if there was a  
> memory leak issue on account of the application itself (causing X to  
> consume large amounts of memory), that it might be also evident in  
> Windows as well. Furthermore; SLES is one of the certified operating  
> systems for the application, and therefore; I further surmise that it  
> wouldn’t have been certified for use if this was such a major issue for  
> the application such that the application is the cause of it.
> 
> In regards to your second point - I have addressed it in part in my  
> response above. But to further expand on that, yes, most HPC  
> installations would use this as a solver-only configuration, but there  
> are also some other HPC installations that would allow you to VPN into  
> the HPC cluster itself so that you can do large pre- and post-processing  
> on the HPC (because those systems will typically have more memory than  
> your typical high-end workstation).
> 
> I forget if I have ssh remote access configured for the system, but if I  
> need to, that isn’t difficult to set up.
> 
> I will need to do some research so that it will mount an smb share (from  
> a Windows server) perpetually on startup, and I also reckon that getting  
> it to auto-log in at run level 3 should also be something that can be  
> done, and isn’t particularly difficult to do.
> 
> I can definitely try conducting tests at run level 3 to see if the  
> memory issue still persists, but I still don’t really fully understand  
> why it happened in the first place.
> 
> And I might be able to make that switch to run level 3 as the default  
> permanently, but I would prefer not to if I don’t necessarily have to.[/color]

Just to be clear, you are welcome to leave the system at runlevel five  
(5), or graphical.target, but just do not run that program and see how  
that changes things. My guess is that Xorg itself is not taking that much  
memory, because that is insane, but rather something about that program is  
taking that much memory when running in the GUI. The actual analysis bits  
themselves are not using that much memory, and they’re the workhorses, but  
something else about the system is causing Xorg to use it. Very odd, in  
my opinion, but I rarely run Xorg, and never if I can help it.  
[color=blue]

> 1. I don’t know if the SuSE Forums is having an issue, but it appears  
> that it lost my original reply. Not sure what happened there.[/color]

Me neither; I see this as a second post.  
[color=blue]

> 1. For some reason, when I tried to type in sudo /usr/bin/systemctl  
> multi-user.target, it says that it doesn’t know what “multi-user.target”  
> is or what it means. Not sure why.[/color]

I thought I was mistyping it, and it turns out I was. I should have had  
an ‘isolate’ in there:

```auto
sudo /usr/bin/systemctl isolate multii-user.target
```

[color=blue]

> 1. Also interestingly enough, sudo init 3 worked, and so I am re-running  
> the tests right now to see what will happen.[/color]

Hooray for backwards-compatibility!  
[color=blue]

> However, to me, the question still exists - why should/would X be doing  
> this thing with the memory in the first place given the statements that  
> I had written above.[/color]

I agree, and I do not mean to stifle this conversation or cease pursuit of  
the issue, but merely to better-isolate it. If you are on current code,  
and if you can duplicate this reliably, then I would probably start with  
the vendor of the application, but if you have Service Requests (SR) with  
SUSE, engage them directly too. The forums are filled with volunteers,  
and some employees, but the official route uses SRs. In the end it may be  
that something about the application forces Xorg to chew up memory, though  
I think that is relatively unlikely unless the application is rendering  
some really-crazy-amazing pictures.

As a test, run the program in the GUI, duplicate the problem, and then  
close the program. Does Xorgclean up? What if you logout/login again?

–  
Good luck.

If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
show your appreciation and click on the star below.

If you want to send me a private message, please let me know in the  
forum as I do not use the web interface often.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![alpha754293](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@alpha754293](https://forums.suse.com/u/alpha754293)\
**Post date:** [August 8, 2017, 1:54pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/8 "2017-08-08T13:54:05Z")

</div>

[QUOTE=ab;39020]  
I do not know what X is doing to use that much memory. It could be an  
Xorg bug I suppose, but wow what a bug to just chew through that much  
memory. It would be interesting to know what kind of application it is  
that is doing this, and how it causes X to use that much memory.[/quote]

I’m running Ansys Workbench (Mechanical/Static Structural analysis) using the direct sparse solver which takes the most amount of memory, but sometimes, also is the fastest way to obtain a solution. (And because my system has 128 GB of RAM available, it is able to run the entire solution in RAM so that no disk I/O is needed (even though I have a SATA 6 Gbps SSD).

`
Just to be clear, you are welcome to leave the system at runlevel five
(5), or graphical.target, but just do not run that program and see how
that changes things. My guess is that Xorg itself is not taking that much
memory, because that is insane, but rather something about that program is
taking that much memory when running in the GUI. The actual analysis bits
themselves are not using that much memory, and they're the workhorses, but
something else about the system is causing Xorg to use it. Very odd, in
my opinion, but I rarely run Xorg, and never if I can help it.`

I can try that. Run it and just leave it sitting at idle to see what happens/what it does.

I was doing some research about this and apparently it does seem to be a bug because a bug report was filed but I don’t know what ever came of it.

Like I said, I am evaluating SLES to see whether it is a viable OS option for the system (because I hae 4 nodes, so I am going to be starting the clustering test soon), because if it SLES is able to run the analysis faster, then I’ll want to use that.

But if I can’t, then I’ll have to stick with Windows. (And clustering with Windows is a whole 'nother animal altogether.)

[quote][color=blue]

> 1. I don’t know if the SuSE Forums is having an issue, but it appears  
> that it lost my original reply. Not sure what happened there.[/color]

Me neither; I see this as a second post.[/quote]

It only shows up once on my end. 'Tis very strange.

[quote][color=blue]

> 1. For some reason, when I tried to type in sudo /usr/bin/systemctl  
> multi-user.target, it says that it doesn’t know what “multi-user.target”  
> is or what it means. Not sure why.[/color]

I thought I was mistyping it, and it turns out I was. I should have had  
an ‘isolate’ in there:

`
sudo /usr/bin/systemctl isolate multii-user.target
`[/quote]

Ah…okay…gotcha.

Well…either way, I was able to take it out of the GUI mode into run level 3 with sudo init 3. Interestingly enough, I did also reboot the system (Power Control - Reset) via the IPMI Java application (yay to IPMI) and I did have ssh configured on the system so I was able to remotely log in with that.

[quote][color=blue]

> 1. Also interestingly enough, sudo init 3 worked, and so I am re-running  
> the tests right now to see what will happen.[/color]

Hooray for backwards-compatibility![/quote]

Yep.

[quote][color=blue]

> However, to me, the question still exists - why should/would X be doing  
> this thing with the memory in the first place given the statements that  
> I had written above.[/color]

I agree, and I do not mean to stifle this conversation or cease pursuit of  
the issue, but merely to better-isolate it. If you are on current code,  
and if you can duplicate this reliably, then I would probably start with  
the vendor of the application, but if you have Service Requests (SR) with  
SUSE, engage them directly too. The forums are filled with volunteers,  
and some employees, but the official route uses SRs. In the end it may be  
that something about the application forces Xorg to chew up memory, though  
I think that is relatively unlikely unless the application is rendering  
some really-crazy-amazing pictures.

As a test, run the program in the GUI, duplicate the problem, and then  
close the program. Does Xorgclean up? What if you logout/login again?[/quote]

re: reliability and repeatability

Yea, the error state is pretty repeatable. I have a shells script that I wrote that runs the analysis using batch processing so it appears almost like “garbage collection” of sorts where the memory and later on swap usage just builds over time.

NORMALLY, at least when I run the exact same thing on Windows (since I am comparing between the two), after each solver iteration, it should be releasing the memory back. Running it at run level 3 appears to be doing that, but I won’t know until the script gets towards the end to see whether this issue is (still) happening.

A couple of people from SuSE actually contacted me last year when I downloaded the evaluation software so I have reached back out to those contacts asking them about this highly technical issue and they’ve referred it to a sales/technical contact for Canada (my geographic region) to investigate.

It is strange though, that this is one of the certified OSes for Ansys, but then there is this issue.

And no, once I close the program, Xorg doesn’t clean up.

The first screenshot that I posted is after the application has been closed and the memory state is still where it is.

Thanks.

–  
Good luck.

If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
show your appreciation and click on the star below.

If you want to send me a private message, please let me know in the  
forum as I do not use the web interface often.[/QUOTE]

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ab1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d2c977/32.png) [@ab1](https://forums.suse.com/u/ab1)\
**Post date:** [August 8, 2017, 5:41pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/9 "2017-08-08T17:41:52Z")

</div>

On 08/08/2017 05:04 AM, alpha754293 wrote:[color=blue]

> I’m running Ansys Workbench (Mechanical/Static Structural analysis)  
> using the direct sparse solver which takes the most amount of memory,  
> but sometimes, also is the fastest way to obtain a solution. (And  
> because my system has 128 GB of RAM available, it is able to run the  
> entire solution in RAM so that no disk I/O is needed (even though I have  
> a SATA 6 Gbps SSD).[/color]

RAM is always better, as you know, if only because it performs better.  
[color=blue]

> I can try that. Run it and just leave it sitting at idle to see what  
> happens/what it does.
> 
> I was doing some research about this and apparently it does seem to be a  
> bug because a bug report was filed but I don’t know what ever came of  
> it.[/color]

Reported against which product, or with which company? Is there a bug number?  
[color=blue]

> Like I said, I am evaluating SLES to see whether it is a viable OS  
> option for the system (because I hae 4 nodes, so I am going to be  
> starting the clustering test soon), because if it SLES is able to run  
> the analysis faster, then I’ll want to use that.
> 
> But if I can’t, then I’ll have to stick with Windows. (And clustering  
> with Windows is a whole 'nother animal altogether.)[/color]

Yes, and terrible I have heard. What kind of clustering are you after  
with a four-node cluster? Is this something where you just want things to  
always run, or would you have all of the boxes working on a part of the  
overall problem?  
[color=blue]

> Well…either way, I was able to take it out of the GUI mode into run  
> level 3 with sudo init 3. Interestingly enough, I did also reboot the  
> system (Power Control - Reset) via the IPMI Java application (yay to  
> IPMI) and I did have ssh configured on the system so I was able to  
> remotely log in with that.[/color]

When doing this I presume memory did not build up, as the memory buildup  
is probably entirely due to something either with the application or how  
it runs within Xorg.  
[color=blue]

> re: reliability and repeatability
> 
> Yea, the error state is pretty repeatable. I have a shells script that I  
> wrote that runs the analysis using batch processing so it appears almost  
> like “garbage collection” of sorts where the memory and later on swap  
> usage just builds over time.
> 
> NORMALLY, at least when I run the exact same thing on Windows (since I  
> am comparing between the two), after each solver iteration, it should be  
> releasing the memory back. Running it at run level 3 appears to be doing  
> that, but I won’t know until the script gets towards the end to see  
> whether this issue is (still) happening.
> 
> A couple of people from SuSE actually contacted me last year when I  
> downloaded the evaluation software so I have reached back out to those  
> contacts asking them about this highly technical issue and they’ve  
> referred it to a sales/technical contact for Canada (my geographic  
> region) to investigate.[/color]

Care to share contact information for various folks? I would guess they  
were sales/account representatives all along, but who knows.  
[color=blue]

> It is strange though, that this is one of the certified OSes for Ansys,  
> but then there is this issue.
> 
> And no, once I close the program, Xorg doesn’t clean up.[/color]

If you change to runlevel three, then back to five, I presume the memory  
does clean up, since that would restart Xorg, but could you confirm that?

–  
Good luck.

If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
show your appreciation and click on the star below.

If you want to send me a private message, please let me know in the  
forum as I do not use the web interface often.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![alpha754293](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@alpha754293](https://forums.suse.com/u/alpha754293)\
**Post date:** [August 8, 2017, 7:39pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/10 "2017-08-08T19:39:09Z")

</div>

[QUOTE=ab;39030]On 08/08/2017 05:04 AM, alpha754293 wrote:[color=blue]

> I’m running Ansys Workbench (Mechanical/Static Structural analysis)  
> using the direct sparse solver which takes the most amount of memory,  
> but sometimes, also is the fastest way to obtain a solution. (And  
> because my system has 128 GB of RAM available, it is able to run the  
> entire solution in RAM so that no disk I/O is needed (even though I have  
> a SATA 6 Gbps SSD).[/color]

RAM is always better, as you know, if only because it performs better.  
[/quote]

That is nominally true IF and ONLY IF it doesn’t swap. If it swaps, then it is at the mercy of the swap storage subsystem I/O interface, which even though you can get PCIe SSDs, is still not the same.

Ironically though, Windows usually will always have swap/page file, but the impact of having one isn’t gravely detrimental and actually does better than NOT having one at all - because it’s Windows.

[quote=ab]  
[color=blue]

> I can try that. Run it and just leave it sitting at idle to see what  
> happens/what it does.
> 
> I was doing some research about this and apparently it does seem to be a  
> bug because a bug report was filed but I don’t know what ever came of  
> it.[/color]

Reported against which product, or with which company? Is there a bug number?[/quote]

SuSE - Xref here: [https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/495133-Xorg-Gobbling-Up-Memory-on-openSUSE-13-1-x64](https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/495133-Xorg-Gobbling-Up-Memory-on-openSUSE-13-1-x64) for the thread and the bug report here: [https://bugzilla.novell.com/show\_bug.cgi?id=849735](https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=849735)

No report has been filed with Ansys yet. I will be doing that once I collect some more data.

(The downside of software or any system really is that when there is an issue like this, so many times, the default is blaming and finger pointing rather than actually solving the issue.)

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> Like I said, I am evaluating SLES to see whether it is a viable OS  
> option for the system (because I hae 4 nodes, so I am going to be  
> starting the clustering test soon), because if it SLES is able to run  
> the analysis faster, then I’ll want to use that.
> 
> But if I can’t, then I’ll have to stick with Windows. (And clustering  
> with Windows is a whole 'nother animal altogether.)[/color]

Yes, and terrible I have heard. What kind of clustering are you after  
with a four-node cluster? Is this something where you just want things to  
always run, or would you have all of the boxes working on a part of the  
overall problem?[/quote]

It will be like a micro HPC cluster (with just the 4 nodes) in the Supermicro 2U four half-width 2P nodes. (So, not HA/failover or something like that. HPC - or more specifically, micro HPC. I’m going to be severely limited with just a GbE NIC as the interconnect rather than a high speed fiber or even 10 GbE interconnect.)

It’s my first foray into clustering.

Well…if I try clustering, I am going to try to have a homogenous clustering environment so that either all 4 nodes run Linux or all 4 nodes run Windows. Each has their own upsides and downsides. I don’t really know yet to be honest.

The idea/intent is that with the slow GbE interconnect - would it even make sense for me to try and put the nodes into a cluster or would the nodes be better served working on four separate problems/solutions simultaneously vs. working on one problem (somewhat regardless of size) hampered by the slow interconnect.

So not sure yet.

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> Well…either way, I was able to take it out of the GUI mode into run  
> level 3 with sudo init 3. Interestingly enough, I did also reboot the  
> system (Power Control - Reset) via the IPMI Java application (yay to  
> IPMI) and I did have ssh configured on the system so I was able to  
> remotely log in with that.[/color]

When doing this I presume memory did not build up, as the memory buildup  
is probably entirely due to something either with the application or how  
it runs within Xorg.[/quote]

Yeah, not sure. TBD. The batch processing script is running now. I am in and out of meetings all day today so I don’t have a chance to check in on how it is doing, so again, TBD. Will report back later on tonight.

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> re: reliability and repeatability
> 
> Yea, the error state is pretty repeatable. I have a shells script that I  
> wrote that runs the analysis using batch processing so it appears almost  
> like “garbage collection” of sorts where the memory and later on swap  
> usage just builds over time.
> 
> NORMALLY, at least when I run the exact same thing on Windows (since I  
> am comparing between the two), after each solver iteration, it should be  
> releasing the memory back. Running it at run level 3 appears to be doing  
> that, but I won’t know until the script gets towards the end to see  
> whether this issue is (still) happening.
> 
> A couple of people from SuSE actually contacted me last year when I  
> downloaded the evaluation software so I have reached back out to those  
> contacts asking them about this highly technical issue and they’ve  
> referred it to a sales/technical contact for Canada (my geographic  
> region) to investigate.[/color]

Care to share contact information for various folks? I would guess they  
were sales/account representatives all along, but who knows.[/quote]

The email was sent to Jason Yeagley who then referred it to Lisa Mitchell and she has brought in Sean Rickerd as a technical expert/subject matter expert into the discussion as well to try and help diagnose and fix this issue.

(I think that I should be okay to post those names of the people whom I am working with on this.)

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> It is strange though, that this is one of the certified OSes for Ansys,  
> but then there is this issue.
> 
> And no, once I close the program, Xorg doesn’t clean up.[/color]

If you change to runlevel three, then back to five, I presume the memory  
does clean up, since that would restart Xorg, but could you confirm that?[/quote]

I will have to find out. I got impatient last night when I first try to put it into run level 3 last night hence why I sent the power reset command to the node via the IPMI. I probably could have waited, but I didn’t know how long it would take for the system to clean itself up and there was also no message printed to console/display:0 that said it was doing anything of the sort so I couldn’t tell if it just froze or if it was just busy with the clean up.

Will try it again when I get a chance to do so (after this batch processing script has completed).

Thanks.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ab1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d2c977/32.png) [@ab1](https://forums.suse.com/u/ab1)\
**Post date:** [August 8, 2017, 8:27pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/11 "2017-08-08T20:27:46Z")

</div>

On 08/08/2017 10:44 AM, alpha754293 wrote:[color=blue]

> ab;39030 Wrote:[color=green]
> 
> > On 08/08/2017 05:04 AM, alpha754293 wrote:[color=darkred]
> > 
> > > I’m running Ansys Workbench (Mechanical/Static Structural analysis)  
> > > using the direct sparse solver which takes the most amount of memory,  
> > > but sometimes, also is the fastest way to obtain a solution. (And  
> > > because my system has 128 GB of RAM available, it is able to run the  
> > > entire solution in RAM so that no disk I/O is needed (even though I[/color]  
> > > have[color=darkred]  
> > > a SATA 6 Gbps SSD).[/color]
> > 
> > RAM is always better, as you know, if only because it performs better.  
> > [/color]
> 
> That is _nominally_ true IF and ONLY IF it doesn’t swap. If it swaps,  
> then it is at the mercy of the swap storage subsystem I/O interface,  
> which even though you can get PCIe SSDs, is still not the same.[/color]

That (swap) is not RAM, then. Virtual memory, sure, but not RAM. RAM is  
always better, always, because it is RAM. Virtual memory can include RAM  
as well as swap, but RAM is RAM is RAM, and nothing else.  
[color=blue]

> ab Wrote:[color=green]
> 
> > [color=darkred]
> > 
> > > I can try that. Run it and just leave it sitting at idle to see what  
> > > happens/what it does.
> > > 
> > > I was doing some research about this and apparently it does seem to be[/color]  
> > > a[color=darkred]  
> > > bug because a bug report was filed but I don’t know what ever came of  
> > > it.[/color]
> > 
> > Reported against which product, or with which company? Is there a bug  
> > number?[/color]
> 
> SuSE - Xref here:  
> [https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/495133-Xorg-Gobbling-Up-Memory-on-openSUSE-13-1-x64](https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/495133-Xorg-Gobbling-Up-Memory-on-openSUSE-13-1-x64)  
> for the thread and the bug report here:  
> [https://bugzilla.novell.com/show\_bug.cgi?id=849735](https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=849735)[/color]

That is pretty old, and on a much older version f openSUSE than you are on  
for SLES. It is also resolved, though not with the best comments ever.  
[color=blue]

> It will be like a micro HPC cluster (with just the 4 nodes) in the  
> Supermicro 2U four half-width 2P nodes. (So, not HA/failover or  
> something like that. HPC - or more specifically, micro HPC. I’m going to  
> be severely limited with just a GbE NIC as the interconnect rather than  
> a high speed fiber or even 10 GbE interconnect.)
> 
> It’s my first foray into clustering.[/color]

Sounds fun! I’ve done a fair bit, but always the failover type. If you  
can share your experience here that would probably be great to read about.  
If you write up technical articles on what you do you can also submit  
them as “AppNotes” and get points for them, which are redeemable in  
various ways, including Amazon $$s, at a fairly decent rate.  
[color=blue]

> Well…if I try clustering, I am going to try to have a homogenous  
> clustering environment so that either all 4 nodes run Linux or all 4  
> nodes run Windows. Each has their own upsides and downsides. I don’t  
> really know yet to be honest.
> 
> The idea/intent is that with the slow GbE interconnect - would it even  
> make sense for me to try and put the nodes into a cluster or would the  
> nodes be better served working on four separate problems/solutions  
> simultaneously vs. working on one problem (somewhat regardless of size)  
> hampered by the slow interconnect.[/color]

What does your application do through the NICs? While gigabit is now  
ten-gigabit, it’s also not a huge slouch for most tasks. Does the  
application have enough work that needs to go through there, in a  
short-enough period of time, to be limited by gigabit connections?  
[color=blue]

> ab Wrote:[color=green]
> 
> > [color=darkred]
> > 
> > > Well…either way, I was able to take it out of the GUI mode into run  
> > > level 3 with sudo init 3. Interestingly enough, I did also reboot the  
> > > system (Power Control - Reset) via the IPMI Java application (yay to  
> > > IPMI) and I did have ssh configured on the system so I was able to  
> > > remotely log in with that.[/color]
> > 
> > When doing this I presume memory did not build up, as the memory  
> > buildup  
> > is probably entirely due to something either with the application or  
> > how  
> > it runs within Xorg.[/color]
> 
> Yeah, not sure. TBD. The batch processing script is running now. I am in  
> and out of meetings all day today so I don’t have a chance to check in  
> on how it is doing, so again, TBD. Will report back later on tonight.[/color]

I’m 99% sure it will not, since not-using Xorg at all means Xorg should  
not build up memory, even if it is running over there like any other  
process not being used.  
[color=blue]

> ab Wrote:[color=green]
> 
> > [color=darkred]
> > 
> > > re: reliability and repeatability
> > > 
> > > Yea, the error state is pretty repeatable. I have a shells script that[/color]  
> > > I[color=darkred]  
> > > wrote that runs the analysis using batch processing so it appears[/color]  
> > > almost[color=darkred]  
> > > like “garbage collection” of sorts where the memory and later on swap  
> > > usage just builds over time.
> > > 
> > > NORMALLY, at least when I run the exact same thing on Windows (since[/color]  
> > > I[color=darkred]  
> > > am comparing between the two), after each solver iteration, it should[/color]  
> > > be[color=darkred]  
> > > releasing the memory back. Running it at run level 3 appears to be[/color]  
> > > doing[color=darkred]  
> > > that, but I won’t know until the script gets towards the end to see  
> > > whether this issue is (still) happening.
> > > 
> > > A couple of people from SuSE actually contacted me last year when I  
> > > downloaded the evaluation software so I have reached back out to[/color]  
> > > those[color=darkred]  
> > > contacts asking them about this highly technical issue and they’ve  
> > > referred it to a sales/technical contact for Canada (my geographic  
> > > region) to investigate.[/color]
> > 
> > Care to share contact information for various folks? I would guess  
> > they  
> > were sales/account representatives all along, but who knows.[/color]
> 
> The email was sent to Jason Yeagley who then referred it to Lisa  
> Mitchell and she has brought in Sean Rickerd as a technical  
> expert/subject matter expert into the discussion as well to try and help  
> diagnose and fix this issue.
> 
> (I think that I should be okay to post those names of the people whom I  
> am working with on this.)[/color]

Sure, why not?  
[color=blue]

> ab Wrote:[color=green]
> 
> > [color=darkred]
> > 
> > > It is strange though, that this is one of the certified OSes for[/color]  
> > > Ansys,[color=darkred]  
> > > but then there is this issue.
> > > 
> > > And no, once I close the program, Xorg doesn’t clean up.[/color]
> > 
> > If you change to runlevel three, then back to five, I presume the  
> > memory  
> > does clean up, since that would restart Xorg, but could you confirm  
> > that?[/color]
> 
> I will have to find out. I got impatient last night when I first try to  
> put it into run level 3 last night hence why I sent the power reset  
> command to the node via the IPMI. I probably could have waited, but I  
> didn’t know how long it would take for the system to clean itself up and  
> there was also no message printed to console/display:0 that said it was  
> doing anything of the sort so I couldn’t tell if it just froze or if it  
> was just busy with the clean up.[/color]

If you change runlevels you may need to explicitly change back to a valid  
TTY; e.g. press Ctrl+Alt+F2 to go back to a TTY in case it does not  
automatically switch from the GUI’s area to the correct TTY, and that may  
just feel like an infinite wait which would be annoying.

–  
Good luck.

If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
show your appreciation and click on the star below.

If you want to send me a private message, please let me know in the  
forum as I do not use the web interface often.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![alpha754293](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@alpha754293](https://forums.suse.com/u/alpha754293)\
**Post date:** [August 8, 2017, 9:24pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/12 "2017-08-08T21:24:19Z")

</div>

[QUOTE=ab;39037]On 08/08/2017 10:44 AM, alpha754293 wrote:[color=blue]

> ab;39030 Wrote:[color=green]
> 
> > On 08/08/2017 05:04 AM, alpha754293 wrote:[color=darkred]
> > 
> > > I’m running Ansys Workbench (Mechanical/Static Structural analysis)  
> > > using the direct sparse solver which takes the most amount of memory,  
> > > but sometimes, also is the fastest way to obtain a solution. (And  
> > > because my system has 128 GB of RAM available, it is able to run the  
> > > entire solution in RAM so that no disk I/O is needed (even though I[/color]  
> > > have[color=darkred]  
> > > a SATA 6 Gbps SSD).[/color]
> > 
> > RAM is always better, as you know, if only because it performs better.  
> > [/color]
> 
> That is _nominally_ true IF and ONLY IF it doesn’t swap. If it swaps,  
> then it is at the mercy of the swap storage subsystem I/O interface,  
> which even though you can get PCIe SSDs, is still not the same.[/color]

That (swap) is not RAM, then. Virtual memory, sure, but not RAM. RAM is  
always better, always, because it is RAM. Virtual memory can include RAM  
as well as swap, but RAM is RAM is RAM, and nothing else.[/quote]

Correct - swap is not on a ramdisk mount point. But I make the distinction between the solver memory allocation that is dynamically sets/allocates during the course of the solver run vs. the swap that requires size/allocation/blocks on a “storage device” that is identified and recognised by the system as a storage device that isn’t a ramdisk (such that you can actually mount ‘swap’ onto).

The second reason why I make this distinction is that in the case where Xorg is consuming such large amounts of memory and isn’t releasing it back into the pool of “available” RAM, either it (Xorg) or the OS forces the application to start using virtual memory.

So while the solver might have identified the total RAM installed and would then try to fit the solution within that, what happens in reality, as managed by the OS, which the application may not see (and generally, may not care about as much because the memory management responsibilities lies primarily with the OS rather than the app), it ends up swapping like mad while trying to address or allocate the RAM requested for the in-core solution.

As a result, instead of, for example, the solution being completed between 4-5 hours, it ends up taking more like 124 hours instead on account of that.

This is why this issue is so critical to me.

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> ab Wrote:[color=green]
> 
> > [color=darkred]
> > 
> > > I can try that. Run it and just leave it sitting at idle to see what  
> > > happens/what it does.
> > > 
> > > I was doing some research about this and apparently it does seem to be[/color]  
> > > a[color=darkred]  
> > > bug because a bug report was filed but I don’t know what ever came of  
> > > it.[/color]
> > 
> > Reported against which product, or with which company? Is there a bug  
> > number?[/color]
> 
> SuSE - Xref here:  
> [https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/495133-Xorg-Gobbling-Up-Memory-on-openSUSE-13-1-x64](https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/495133-Xorg-Gobbling-Up-Memory-on-openSUSE-13-1-x64)  
> for the thread and the bug report here:  
> [https://bugzilla.novell.com/show\_bug.cgi?id=849735](https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=849735)[/color]

That is pretty old, and on a much older version f openSUSE than you are on  
for SLES. It is also resolved, though not with the best comments ever.[/quote]

The bug report itself is pretty old, but the error state, as presented to me as an end user, isn’t.

Therefore; from my perspective, it still appears to be the same error state, and since valgrind couldn’t find a memory leak in that bug report, and I tried running it on my system and it also didn’t find any memory leaks, then it tells me that there is something else going on.

The problem is that with the bug report being closed - rather than trying to open another one - this is what led me here and also to contact the SuSE contacts again about this issue.

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> It will be like a micro HPC cluster (with just the 4 nodes) in the  
> Supermicro 2U four half-width 2P nodes. (So, not HA/failover or  
> something like that. HPC - or more specifically, micro HPC. I’m going to  
> be severely limited with just a GbE NIC as the interconnect rather than  
> a high speed fiber or even 10 GbE interconnect.)
> 
> It’s my first foray into clustering.[/color]

Sounds fun! I’ve done a fair bit, but always the failover type. If you  
can share your experience here that would probably be great to read about.  
If you write up technical articles on what you do you can also submit  
them as “AppNotes” and get points for them, which are redeemable in  
various ways, including Amazon $$s, at a fairly decent rate.[/quote]

Sure. I can certainly do that.

But that won’t happen for a little while… - need to get this issue resolved first.

(P.S. I might need your help to vary degrees or aspects, and you can be a co-author on the technical article for setting up a micro HPC cluster for this because I am sure that it can be useful to other small and medium businesses that also are looking to do something like this.)

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> Well…if I try clustering, I am going to try to have a homogenous  
> clustering environment so that either all 4 nodes run Linux or all 4  
> nodes run Windows. Each has their own upsides and downsides. I don’t  
> really know yet to be honest.
> 
> The idea/intent is that with the slow GbE interconnect - would it even  
> make sense for me to try and put the nodes into a cluster or would the  
> nodes be better served working on four separate problems/solutions  
> simultaneously vs. working on one problem (somewhat regardless of size)  
> hampered by the slow interconnect.[/color]

What does your application do through the NICs? While gigabit is now  
ten-gigabit, it’s also not a huge slouch for most tasks. Does the  
application have enough work that needs to go through there, in a  
short-enough period of time, to be limited by gigabit connections?[/quote]

So…for parallel mechanical engineering analysis and simulations, there is a way that I can “break up” a problem that needs to be solved into many pieces. If it is within the same “pizza box”, then it can either run in what’s called symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) mode (also called “shared memory parallel” mode) such that it never leaves the host or it can run in a massively parallel processing (MPP) or distributed memory processing (DMP) mode (they are analogous with each other) and that means that it can run outside of one “pizza box” and on multiple “pizza boxes” (e.g. nodes).

So, in typical high performance computing (HPC) applications, parallelisation happens a LOT. Think a little like the massive supercomputers that set computational throughput records. Except that this is a micro version of that with only four nodes, and each node having two sockets and each socket having an 8-core processor.

Large HPC installations have upto hundreds of thousands of CPU cores (possibly augmented by hundreds of thousands of GPU cores). I don’t have that kind of budget. So I only have a measly 64-cores in total, and 512 GB of RAM in total (across all 4 nodes).

So the information that might be passed between the nodes/hosts, for example, if I am running a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) case, it can be passing the nodal density (mass) and velocities information of a domain that has been split up/decomposed into pieces so that each core from any of the nodes can work on solving the nodal variables.

The best way that I can think about it is you have a team of 64 people arranged in an 8x8 configuration. Your task is to walk forward as a whole, and you have enough arms such that you are always connected to the person adjacent to you. Some will need 2 arms to do that (people on the corners). Some would need 3 arms (people on the edges connecting to people in the middle) and some people will need 4 arms (people in the middle that have someone in front of them, behind them, to the left and to the right of them).

Your objective is to walk forward as a unit.

And to “complicate” things, there are two opaque walls that divide the 8x8 matrix into four quadrants.

The people at the interface between the quadrants are the people who will need to communicate to their counterparts in another quadrant how they are doing “in terms of their position” and how they are progressing with the goal of walking forward.

That communication by those people is what would be the information that would be going through the network (also know as the system interconnect).

Hope that helps to explain it (using an example of a corporate team building exercise as the reference).

To your question about the workload - yes.

Put it this way, a solution that uses the direct, sparse solver for my model uses 40-ish GB of RAM. If I spread that between 4 nodes, acrossed 64 cores, think about splitting the 40 GB into either 4 parts (where each part = per node RAM requirement for the solution) or 64 “pieces” which represent the amount of RAM that each core (from all four nodes, with 64-cores in total) would need. The solution for the entire problem would then have to be coordinated back into a single, unified, coherent solution that represents the original system that the solution started out with.

So think about the core-to-core memory interconnect interface (e.g. QPI) which runs at speeds upto 25.6 GB/s (loosely ~256 Gbps\*). (\*if 8b/10b encoding is still used)

Fibre interconnects like Infiniband is up to 56 Gbps (which uses 64b/66b encoding). 1 GbE still uses 8b/10b encoding, so the link is capable of a rate of 1 Gbps, which is 1/256 of QPI (at 3.2 GHz).

So going back to the example of the “corporate team building exercise” to in my attempt to illustrate this:

That would be like instead you being allowed to speak - you can only communicate using hand squeezes. And you aren’t allowed to squeeze your hand again until they squeeze your hand back after understanding your hand squeeze command/signal and executing it.

So you are in control. Your hand squeeze gives them the command to move. They move. And then they will have to squeeze your hand BACK to tell you and confirm that they have executed your command before you are allowed to issue your next command again to move forward again.

That’s like GbE (relatively speaking). The fibre optic interconnect would be like you being allowed to speak and you have the ability to listen to multiple feedback and give multiple commands simultaneously in order to have the whole group walk forward.

Hope this explanation helps. (The specific “thing” is called message passing interface (MPI), which if you are really interested, you can look into that. Pretty nifty stuff. I don’t program myself, so I don’t really use it, but I needed to understand enough about how it works and what it does.)

Point being - there is a lot of data/traffic that goes on between the cores, and so if the cores are on different nodes, then there will be that traffic that goes through the GbE NIC.

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> ab Wrote:[color=green]
> 
> > [color=darkred]
> > 
> > > Well…either way, I was able to take it out of the GUI mode into run  
> > > level 3 with sudo init 3. Interestingly enough, I did also reboot the  
> > > system (Power Control - Reset) via the IPMI Java application (yay to  
> > > IPMI) and I did have ssh configured on the system so I was able to  
> > > remotely log in with that.[/color]
> > 
> > When doing this I presume memory did not build up, as the memory  
> > buildup  
> > is probably entirely due to something either with the application or  
> > how  
> > it runs within Xorg.[/color]
> 
> Yeah, not sure. TBD. The batch processing script is running now. I am in  
> and out of meetings all day today so I don’t have a chance to check in  
> on how it is doing, so again, TBD. Will report back later on tonight.[/color]

I’m 99% sure it will not, since not-using Xorg at all means Xorg should  
not build up memory, even if it is running over there like any other  
process not being used.[/quote]

It is difficult for me to tell right now only because with the solver running, I am only taking periodic snapshots of the memory usage via ssh right now.

That’s kind of why I want to wait until my entire script is finished so that I am able to replicate the issue by doing exactly the same thing I did the last two times and then collecting the data.

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> ab Wrote:[color=green]
> 
> > [color=darkred]
> > 
> > > re: reliability and repeatability
> > > 
> > > Yea, the error state is pretty repeatable. I have a shells script that[/color]  
> > > I[color=darkred]  
> > > wrote that runs the analysis using batch processing so it appears[/color]  
> > > almost[color=darkred]  
> > > like “garbage collection” of sorts where the memory and later on swap  
> > > usage just builds over time.
> > > 
> > > NORMALLY, at least when I run the exact same thing on Windows (since[/color]  
> > > I[color=darkred]  
> > > am comparing between the two), after each solver iteration, it should[/color]  
> > > be[color=darkred]  
> > > releasing the memory back. Running it at run level 3 appears to be[/color]  
> > > doing[color=darkred]  
> > > that, but I won’t know until the script gets towards the end to see  
> > > whether this issue is (still) happening.
> > > 
> > > A couple of people from SuSE actually contacted me last year when I  
> > > downloaded the evaluation software so I have reached back out to[/color]  
> > > those[color=darkred]  
> > > contacts asking them about this highly technical issue and they’ve  
> > > referred it to a sales/technical contact for Canada (my geographic  
> > > region) to investigate.[/color]
> > 
> > Care to share contact information for various folks? I would guess  
> > they  
> > were sales/account representatives all along, but who knows.[/color]
> 
> The email was sent to Jason Yeagley who then referred it to Lisa  
> Mitchell and she has brought in Sean Rickerd as a technical  
> expert/subject matter expert into the discussion as well to try and help  
> diagnose and fix this issue.
> 
> (I think that I should be okay to post those names of the people whom I  
> am working with on this.)[/color]

Sure, why not?[/quote]

Not sure if there were policies here restricting that.

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> ab Wrote:[color=green]
> 
> > [color=darkred]
> > 
> > > It is strange though, that this is one of the certified OSes for[/color]  
> > > Ansys,[color=darkred]  
> > > but then there is this issue.
> > > 
> > > And no, once I close the program, Xorg doesn’t clean up.[/color]
> > 
> > If you change to runlevel three, then back to five, I presume the  
> > memory  
> > does clean up, since that would restart Xorg, but could you confirm  
> > that?[/color]
> 
> I will have to find out. I got impatient last night when I first try to  
> put it into run level 3 last night hence why I sent the power reset  
> command to the node via the IPMI. I probably could have waited, but I  
> didn’t know how long it would take for the system to clean itself up and  
> there was also no message printed to console/display:0 that said it was  
> doing anything of the sort so I couldn’t tell if it just froze or if it  
> was just busy with the clean up.[/color]

If you change runlevels you may need to explicitly change back to a valid  
TTY; e.g. press Ctrl+Alt+F2 to go back to a TTY in case it does not  
automatically switch from the GUI’s area to the correct TTY, and that may  
just feel like an infinite wait which would be annoying.[/quote]

I might try that the next time I change between run level 5 to 3.

TBD…

Thank you for your help/responses.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![alpha754293](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@alpha754293](https://forums.suse.com/u/alpha754293)\
**Post date:** [August 18, 2017, 9:35pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/13 "2017-08-18T21:35:02Z")

</div>

Update:

So I have switched over from run level 5 to run level 3.

I’ve also change the vfs\_cache\_pressure from the default 100 to 200 (via $ echo 200 \> /proc/sys/vm/vfs\_cache\_pressure) and it is still doing the same thing (based on the links that Gaby Beitler (Sales Engineer, SuSE) sent to me).

The command:

> [@](#):
>
> # echo 3 \> /proc/sys/vm/drop\_caches

Also worked to clear up the cache as well, but I am now starting to look into trying to get Linux to completely stop caching (because for what I am doing/using it for - it is creating a MASSIVE problem for me).

Also interesting is that Linux, BY DEFAULT, will cache pagecache, and slab objects (inode and dentries) at a priority HIGHER than the user’s application such that when my application makes a request for RAM, instead of it automatically clearing the cache, to free up the RAM for the application, it sends the application’s request for RAM over to swap instead.

I have NOOO idea why it would do something like that.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ab1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d2c977/32.png) [@ab1](https://forums.suse.com/u/ab1)\
**Post date:** [August 18, 2017, 11:42pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/14 "2017-08-18T23:42:55Z")

</div>

Care to show some of the output from commands? I find it a little  
surprising, even hard to believe, that xorg would be using so much RAM  
when it is presumably not even running.

```auto
free
ps aux
cat /proc/vm/swappiness
```

In particular you should be able to set your swappiness to zero (0) which  
disables it unless absolutely necessary. Even then, with bunch of  
processes needing 1 GiB each, I do not see how you could be getting into  
swap very much, but who knows how your system is configured. Tune  
swappiness by using sysctl and/or writing to the /proc/vm/swappiness  
“file” directly:

```auto
echo 0 > /proc/vm/swappiness
```

While clearing cache is not a bad idea, the issue you showed us earlier  
did not look like a caching issue on its own. You had 128 GiB of RM  
really truly used, not just caching stuff, and we could see that xorg had  
a huge chunk of it used.

Unless you want to use insane amounts of swap, I would also strongly  
recommend either getting rid of that swap space or greatly-reducing it.  
You seem to know how much RAM should be used, and you have sized your  
system well above that, but then you still have double that amount of  
swap, maybe because you found a really old recommendation on swap that  
said you should have 2x memory in swap; that was a nice recommendation  
back in the days when there were computers with 256 MB, even 1 GiB RAM,  
but the only reason to even have 1x RAM these days is to suspend to disk  
(i.e. hibernate) your machine, which is not likely to be something you’ll  
ever do with a server in an HPC environment.

–  
Good luck.

If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
show your appreciation and click on the star below.

If you want to send me a private message, please let me know in the  
forum as I do not use the web interface often.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![malcolmlewis](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/forums.suse.com/malcolmlewis/32/11375_2.png) [@malcolmlewis](https://forums.suse.com/u/malcolmlewis)\
**Post date:** [August 19, 2017, 1:12am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/15 "2017-08-19T01:12:18Z")

</div>

> [@](#):
>
> On Fri 18 Aug 2017 08:42:55 PM CDT, ab wrote:
> 
> Care to show some of the output from commands? I find it a little  
> surprising, even hard to believe, that xorg would be using so much RAM  
> when it is presumably not even running.
> 
> ```auto
> free
> ps aux
> cat /proc/vm/swappiness
> ```
> 
> In particular you should be able to set your swappiness to zero (0)  
> which disables it unless absolutely necessary. Even then, with bunch of  
> processes needing 1 GiB each, I do not see how you could be getting into  
> swap very much, but who knows how your system is configured. Tune  
> swappiness by using sysctl and/or writing to the /proc/vm/swappiness  
> “file” directly:
> 
> ```auto
> echo 0 > /proc/vm/swappiness
> ```
> 
> While clearing cache is not a bad idea, the issue you showed us earlier  
> did not look like a caching issue on its own. You had 128 GiB of RM  
> really truly used, not just caching stuff, and we could see that xorg  
> had a huge chunk of it used.
> 
> Unless you want to use insane amounts of swap, I would also strongly  
> recommend either getting rid of that swap space or greatly-reducing it.  
> You seem to know how much RAM should be used, and you have sized your  
> system well above that, but then you still have double that amount of  
> swap, maybe because you found a really old recommendation on swap that  
> said you should have 2x memory in swap; that was a nice recommendation  
> back in the days when there were computers with 256 MB, even 1 GiB RAM,  
> but the only reason to even have 1x RAM these days is to suspend to disk  
> (i.e. hibernate) your machine, which is not likely to be something  
> you’ll ever do with a server in an HPC environment.

Hi  
Another couple of commands to run…

```auto
procinfo
cat /proc/meminfo
```

I use the following in my /etc/sysctl.conf

```auto
# Disable swap
vm.swappiness = 1
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 50
```

–  
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)  
openSUSE Leap 42.2|GNOME 3.20.2|4.4.79-18.26-default  
If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
please show your appreciation and click on the star below… Thanks!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![alpha754293](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@alpha754293](https://forums.suse.com/u/alpha754293)\
**Post date:** [August 19, 2017, 4:10am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/16 "2017-08-19T04:10:31Z")

</div>

[QUOTE=ab;39168]Care to show some of the output from commands? I find it a little  
surprising, even hard to believe, that xorg would be using so much RAM  
when it is presumably not even running.

`
free
ps aux
cat /proc/vm/swappiness
`[/QUOTE]

```auto
aes@aes3:~> free
             total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 132066080 122653184 9412896 155376 24 84712440
-/+ buffers/cache: 37940720 94125360
Swap: 268437500 35108 268402392
```

```auto
aes@aes3:~> ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.0 181672 4368 ? Ss Aug07 0:26 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --switched-root --system --deserialize 21
root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [kthreadd]
root 3 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:08 [ksoftirqd/0]
root 5 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/0:0H]
root 8 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:04 [migration/0]
root 9 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [rcu_bh]
root 10 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 14:37 [rcu_sched]
root 11 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/0]
root 12 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/1]
root 13 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:02 [migration/1]
root 14 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [ksoftirqd/1]
root 16 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/1:0H]
root 17 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/2]
root 18 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [migration/2]
root 19 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [ksoftirqd/2]
root 21 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/2:0H]
root 22 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/3]
root 23 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [migration/3]
root 24 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:10 [ksoftirqd/3]
root 26 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/3:0H]
root 27 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/4]
root 28 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [migration/4]
root 29 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:06 [ksoftirqd/4]
root 31 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/4:0H]
root 32 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/5]
root 33 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [migration/5]
root 34 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [ksoftirqd/5]
root 36 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/5:0H]
root 37 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/6]
root 38 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [migration/6]
root 39 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [ksoftirqd/6]
root 41 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/6:0H]
root 42 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/7]
root 43 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [migration/7]
root 44 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [ksoftirqd/7]
root 46 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/7:0H]
root 47 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/8]
root 48 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:05 [migration/8]
root 49 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:07 [ksoftirqd/8]
root 51 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/8:0H]
root 53 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/9]
root 54 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:02 [migration/9]
root 55 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [ksoftirqd/9]
root 57 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/9:0H]
root 58 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/10]
root 59 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [migration/10]
root 60 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [ksoftirqd/10]
root 62 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/10:0H]
root 63 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/11]
root 64 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [migration/11]
root 65 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [ksoftirqd/11]
root 67 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/11:0H]
root 68 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/12]
root 69 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [migration/12]
root 70 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [ksoftirqd/12]
root 72 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/12:0H]
root 73 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/13]
root 74 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [migration/13]
root 75 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [ksoftirqd/13]
root 77 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/13:0H]
root 78 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/14]
root 79 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [migration/14]
root 80 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [ksoftirqd/14]
root 82 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/14:0H]
root 83 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [watchdog/15]
root 84 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [migration/15]
root 85 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [ksoftirqd/15]
root 87 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/15:0H]
root 88 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [khelper]
root 89 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [kdevtmpfs]
root 90 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [netns]
root 91 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [perf]
root 92 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [writeback]
root 93 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kintegrityd]
root 94 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [bioset]
root 95 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [crypto]
root 96 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kblockd]
root 101 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kgraft]
root 102 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [khungtaskd]
root 104 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:04 [kswapd0]
root 105 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:04 [kswapd1]
root 106 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SN Aug07 0:00 [ksmd]
root 107 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SN Aug07 0:08 [khugepaged]
root 108 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [fsnotify_mark]
root 118 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kthrotld]
root 127 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kpsmoused]
root 128 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [print/0]
root 129 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [print/1]
root 149 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [deferwq]
root 187 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [kauditd]
root 208 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:34 [kworker/15:1]
root 300 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [ata_sff]
root 303 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [khubd]
root 319 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [scsi_eh_0]
root 321 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [scsi_tmf_0]
root 340 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [scsi_wq_0]
root 350 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [ttm_swap]
root 352 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [scsi_eh_1]
root 353 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [scsi_tmf_1]
root 354 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [scsi_eh_2]
root 355 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [scsi_tmf_2]
root 356 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [scsi_eh_3]
root 357 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [scsi_tmf_3]
root 358 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [scsi_eh_4]
root 359 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [scsi_tmf_4]
root 360 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [scsi_eh_5]
root 361 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [scsi_tmf_5]
root 362 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [scsi_eh_6]
root 363 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [scsi_tmf_6]
root 388 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/12:1H]
root 389 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/8:1H]
root 390 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/0:1H]
root 391 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/13:1H]
root 397 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [bioset]
root 409 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/10:1H]
root 416 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-genwork-1]
root 417 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 3:01 [btrfs-submit-1]
root 418 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-delalloc-]
root 419 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-fixup-1]
root 421 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 422 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-rmw-1]
root 423 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-endio-rai]
root 424 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 426 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:08 [btrfs-freespace]
root 428 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-cache-1]
root 429 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-readahead]
root 431 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-qgroup-re]
root 432 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/11:1H]
root 433 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/14:1H]
root 434 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/15:1H]
root 435 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/9:1H]
root 436 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-cleaner]
root 437 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 4:36 [btrfs-transacti]
root 525 0.0 0.0 51544 11604 ? SLs Aug07 0:06 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journald
root 533 0.0 0.0 21716 808 ? Ss Aug07 0:32 /sbin/dmeventd -f
root 547 0.0 0.0 42500 1256 ? Ss Aug07 0:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-udevd
root 691 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug16 0:00 [kworker/11:1]
root 759 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [edac-poller]
root 765 0.0 0.0 12016 1276 ? Ss Aug07 4:47 /usr/sbin/haveged -w 1024 -v 0 -F
root 816 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kvm-irqfd-clean]
root 1067 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 16:36 0:01 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 1481 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:00 0:01 [kworker/6:2]
root 1550 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SN Aug07 0:00 [kipmi0]
root 1826 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-genwork-1]
root 1827 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 1:51 [btrfs-submit-1]
root 1828 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-delalloc-]
root 1829 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-fixup-1]
root 1830 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:03 [btrfs-endio-1]
root 1831 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 1832 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-rmw-1]
root 1833 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-endio-rai]
root 1834 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 1836 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:06 [btrfs-freespace]
root 1837 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:01 [btrfs-delayed-m]
root 1838 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-cache-1]
root 1839 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-readahead]
root 1841 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-qgroup-re]
root 1866 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 0:00 [btrfs-cleaner]
root 1867 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug07 3:09 [btrfs-transacti]
message+ 2057 0.0 0.0 42928 2648 ? SLs Aug07 0:08 /bin/dbus-daemon --system --address=systemd: --nofork --nopidfile --systemd-activation
avahi 2061 0.0 0.0 28064 1788 ? Ss Aug07 1:09 avahi-daemon: running [aes3.local]
root 2063 0.0 0.0 24932 1800 ? Ss Aug07 0:00 /usr/sbin/smartd -n
root 2066 0.0 0.0 19272 1020 ? Ss Aug07 1:45 /usr/sbin/irqbalance --foreground
root 2069 0.0 0.0 29512 2220 ? SLs Aug07 0:00 /usr/lib/wicked/bin/wickedd-dhcp6 --systemd --foreground
root 2070 0.0 0.0 29456 2444 ? SLs Aug07 0:00 /usr/lib/wicked/bin/wickedd-dhcp4 --systemd --foreground
root 2073 0.0 0.0 29456 1820 ? SLs Aug07 0:00 /usr/lib/wicked/bin/wickedd-auto4 --systemd --foreground
nscd 2087 0.0 0.0 941824 1484 ? Ssl Aug07 0:11 /usr/sbin/nscd
root 2122 0.0 0.0 337836 5692 ? SLsl Aug07 0:01 /usr/sbin/rsyslogd -n
root 2127 0.0 0.0 20080 1440 ? Ss Aug07 0:06 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-logind
root 2129 0.0 0.0 66140 1924 ? Ss Aug07 0:00 login -- ewen
root 2133 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/6:1H]
root 2145 0.0 0.0 29576 2496 ? SLs Aug07 0:00 /usr/sbin/wickedd --systemd --foreground
root 2166 0.0 0.0 29612 2048 ? SLs Aug07 0:00 /usr/sbin/wickedd-nanny --systemd --foreground
root 2769 0.3 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug16 13:29 [btrfs-worker-7]
root 3184 0.0 0.0 437596 8236 ? SLsl Aug07 0:00 /usr/sbin/libvirtd --listen
root 3216 0.0 0.0 47092 2668 ? Ss Aug07 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd -D
root 3295 0.0 0.0 19592 1088 ? Ss Aug07 0:03 /usr/lib/postfix/master -w
postfix 3297 0.0 0.0 21840 2096 ? S Aug07 0:00 qmgr -l -t fifo -u
root 3331 0.0 0.0 18816 1392 ? Ss Aug07 0:02 /usr/sbin/cron -n
root 3517 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug12 0:21 [kworker/10:0]
root 3726 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:01 [kworker/4:1H]
ewen 3910 0.0 0.0 31820 2248 ? Ss Aug07 0:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --user
ewen 3912 0.0 0.0 211744 1984 ? S Aug07 0:00 (sd-pam)
ewen 3913 0.0 0.0 14308 3076 tty1 Ss Aug07 0:01 -bash
root 3988 0.0 0.0 66140 1928 ? Ss Aug07 0:00 login -- ewen
root 4038 0.0 0.0 4724 740 tty4 Ss+ Aug07 0:00 /sbin/agetty --noclear tty4 linux
ewen 4041 0.0 0.0 14192 2604 tty2 Ss+ Aug07 0:00 -bash
root 4273 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 0:01 [kworker/12:0]
ewen 5607 0.0 0.0 13068 1392 tty1 S+ Aug14 0:00 /bin/bash ./run_all_linux.sh
root 5614 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 17:15 0:00 [kworker/1:0]
root 6147 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 0:00 [kworker/u33:0]
ewen 6270 0.7 0.1 813900 139212 ? Ssl Aug07 117:18 /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/linx64/ansysli_server
ewen 6276 0.0 0.0 19028 3160 ? Ss Aug07 4:35 /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/linx64/ansysli_monitor -monitor 6270 -restart_port_timeout 15
ewen 6310 0.0 0.0 16748 968 ? S Aug07 0:12 /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/linx64/lmgrd -c /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/license_files -l /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/license.log
ewen 6311 0.0 0.0 127728 10820 ? Ssl Aug07 1:14 ansyslmd -T aes3 11.13 3 -c :/usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/license_files: -srv 8RVqcog4NKrctkBS4S12tcNsH0p1yQ1OA2pzvxBkrW3MpiIi2tnas9IvZ8XmZiw --lmgrd_start 5988ede6 -vdrestart 0
root 7389 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 17:30 0:00 [kworker/5:0]
root 7527 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/1:1H]
root 7546 0.8 0.0 0 0 ? S 17:31 1:20 [btrfs-worker-8]
root 7654 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:00 [kworker/7:1H]
root 8194 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 08:14 0:05 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 9076 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 17:45 0:00 [kworker/8:2]
root 9220 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 0:05 [btrfs-worker-8]
root 9233 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 17:46 0:01 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 9255 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 0:04 [kworker/3:0]
root 9307 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 03:45 0:03 [kworker/2:1]
root 9435 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 17:47 0:00 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 10804 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 18:00 0:00 [kworker/5:1]
root 10933 0.0 0.0 87684 3200 ? Ss Aug12 0:00 sshd: ewen [priv]
ewen 10940 0.0 0.0 87684 1060 ? S Aug12 0:01 sshd: ewen@pts/1
ewen 10941 0.0 0.0 14320 2408 pts/1 Ss Aug12 0:00 -bash
root 11245 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug08 0:00 [kworker/2:1H]
root 11968 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 13:29 0:02 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 11974 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug16 0:05 [kworker/14:2]
root 13446 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 09:00 0:02 [kworker/9:1]
root 14082 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 18:30 0:01 [kworker/0:1]
root 14084 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 18:30 0:00 [kworker/9:2]
root 14089 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 0:00 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 15156 0.8 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 12:13 [btrfs-worker-2]
root 15157 0.8 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 12:40 [btrfs-worker-3]
root 15158 0.8 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 12:12 [btrfs-worker-4]
root 15160 0.8 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 12:16 [btrfs-worker-6]
root 15161 0.8 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 12:30 [btrfs-worker-7]
root 15162 0.8 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 12:20 [btrfs-worker-8]
root 17226 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 14:15 0:00 [kworker/6:0]
postfix 17960 0.0 0.0 21448 1364 ? S 19:02 0:00 pickup -l -t fifo -u
root 17996 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 05:00 0:00 [kworker/u32:2]
root 18620 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 09:45 0:00 [kworker/2:0]
root 18976 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 14:30 0:00 [kworker/u32:1]
root 19292 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug12 0:00 [btrfs-delayed-m]
root 19428 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:15 0:00 [kworker/1:2]
root 20000 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:19 0:00 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 20028 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:20 0:00 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 20275 0.1 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug09 21:35 [kworker/u34:2]
root 20671 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 14:45 0:00 [kworker/4:2]
root 20766 0.0 0.0 87684 4072 ? Ss Aug07 0:00 sshd: ewen [priv]
ewen 20777 0.0 0.0 87684 1840 ? S Aug07 0:01 sshd: ewen@pts/0
ewen 20778 0.0 0.0 14424 3152 pts/0 Ss+ Aug07 0:00 -bash
root 21077 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:30 0:00 [kworker/0:0]
root 22703 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:45 0:00 [kworker/8:1]
root 24084 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 15:15 0:00 [kworker/7:1]
root 24437 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 20:00 0:00 [kworker/3:1]
root 24851 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 06:00 0:03 [kworker/12:2]
ewen 25555 44.4 0.0 26700 1848 pts/1 RL+ 20:09 0:00 ps aux
ewen 25558 0.0 0.0 13064 1452 ? S 20:09 0:00 sh -c ps -e | grep ansyslmd
ewen 25559 0.0 0.0 24532 1128 ? RL 20:09 0:00 ps -e
ewen 25560 0.0 0.0 10496 948 ? S 20:09 0:00 grep ansyslmd
root 25741 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 15:29 0:01 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 25872 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 15:30 0:01 [kworker/4:0]
root 26315 0.1 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 3:14 [kworker/u33:1]
root 26327 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug07 0:02 [kworker/3:1H]
root 27194 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug16 0:13 [kworker/10:2]
root 27195 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug11 0:01 [btrfs-flush_del]
ewen 27461 0.0 0.0 13592 2232 tty1 S+ 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansys180 -b -dis -np 16 -dir RHD_as_is_direct
root 27533 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 15:45 0:00 [kworker/11:0]
ewen 27539 0.0 0.0 11648 1556 tty1 S+ 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/commonfiles/MPI/Intel/5.1.3.223/linx64/bin/mpirun -np 16 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27544 0.0 0.0 15848 1636 tty1 S+ 01:48 0:00 mpiexec.hydra -np 16 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
root 27545 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 01:48 0:00 [btrfs-endio-2]
ewen 27546 0.0 0.0 15048 1896 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/commonfiles/MPI/Intel/5.1.3.223/linx64/bin//pmi_proxy --control-port aes3:56460 --pmi-connect lazy-cache --pmi-aggregate -s 0 --rmk user --launcher ssh --demux poll --pgid 0 --enable-stdin 1 --retries 10 --control-code 1365381406 --usize -2 --proxy-id 0
ewen 27550 0.0 0.0 12044 2116 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27551 0.0 0.0 12044 2112 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27552 0.0 0.0 12044 2116 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27553 0.0 0.0 12044 2116 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27554 0.0 0.0 12044 2116 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27555 0.0 0.0 12044 2112 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27556 0.0 0.0 12044 2112 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27557 0.0 0.0 12044 2112 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27558 0.0 0.0 12044 2116 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27559 0.0 0.0 12044 2112 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27560 0.0 0.0 12044 2116 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27561 0.0 0.0 12044 2116 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27562 0.0 0.0 12044 2112 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27563 0.0 0.0 12044 2112 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27564 0.0 0.0 12044 2116 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 27568 0.0 0.0 12044 2116 tty1 S 01:48 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/ansysdis180 -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
root 28264 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug09 0:00 [kworker/u34:0]
root 28377 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 06:30 0:00 [kworker/13:1]
ewen 28491 99.3 2.6 4119976 3510564 tty1 R 01:48 1093:54 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28492 93.5 2.6 5526664 3477616 tty1 Rl 01:48 1030:20 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28493 99.1 2.1 3460180 2817188 tty1 R 01:48 1092:06 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28494 99.3 2.0 3328280 2694284 tty1 R 01:48 1093:51 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28495 99.3 2.2 3504608 2943032 tty1 R 01:48 1093:31 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28498 99.3 1.8 3023900 2464696 tty1 R 01:48 1093:34 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28503 99.2 1.9 3119816 2583188 tty1 R 01:48 1093:01 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28504 99.2 1.8 3018592 2457632 tty1 R 01:48 1092:59 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28505 99.3 2.1 3387128 2789020 tty1 R 01:48 1093:37 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28506 99.3 2.3 3665396 3133532 tty1 R 01:48 1093:27 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28507 99.2 2.6 4026096 3451028 tty1 R 01:48 1092:51 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28508 99.3 1.9 3188896 2602020 tty1 R 01:48 1093:25 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28509 99.0 2.2 3458340 2917928 tty1 R 01:48 1090:21 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28510 99.2 1.8 3014900 2453508 tty1 R 01:48 1092:58 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28511 99.3 2.2 3500784 2955932 tty1 R 01:48 1093:45 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
ewen 28512 99.3 2.1 3417656 2863008 tty1 R 01:48 1093:45 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/ansys/bin/linx64/ansys.e -i stdin.27461 -b -dis -dir RHD_as_is_direct
root 29112 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug13 0:00 [btrfs-flush_del]
root 30261 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 06:45 0:02 [kworker/7:0]
root 30646 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug08 0:00 [kworker/5:1H]
root 32167 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 0:06 [kworker/13:2]
root 32190 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug14 0:21 [kworker/15:2]
root 32336 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 11:45 0:01 [kworker/14:0]
```

```auto
aes@aes3:~> cat /proc/vm/swappiness
cat: /proc/vm/swappiness: No such file or directory
```

(I think that you meant /proc/sys/vm/swappiness and that is still at the default value of 60.)

I’ve been changing vfs\_cache\_pressure because that’s supposed to be the thing that controls how much or how often the pagecache and slab objects are cached.

[QUOTE=ab]In particular you should be able to set your swappiness to zero (0) which  
disables it unless absolutely necessary. Even then, with bunch of  
processes needing 1 GiB each, I do not see how you could be getting into  
swap very much, but who knows how your system is configured. Tune  
swappiness by using sysctl and/or writing to the /proc/vm/swappiness  
“file” directly:

```auto
echo 0 > /proc/vm/swappiness
```

While clearing cache is not a bad idea, the issue you showed us earlier  
did not look like a caching issue on its own. You had 128 GiB of RM  
really truly used, not just caching stuff, and we could see that xorg had  
a huge chunk of it used.

Unless you want to use insane amounts of swap, I would also strongly  
recommend either getting rid of that swap space or greatly-reducing it.  
You seem to know how much RAM should be used, and you have sized your  
system well above that, but then you still have double that amount of  
swap, maybe because you found a really old recommendation on swap that  
said you should have 2x memory in swap; that was a nice recommendation  
back in the days when there were computers with 256 MB, even 1 GiB RAM,  
but the only reason to even have 1x RAM these days is to suspend to disk  
(i.e. hibernate) your machine, which is not likely to be something you’ll  
ever do with a server in an HPC environment.

–  
Good luck.

If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
show your appreciation and click on the star below.

If you want to send me a private message, please let me know in the  
forum as I do not use the web interface often.[/QUOTE]

re: what I showed earlier - perhaps this might help

These were screenshots that I took of the terminal window (ssh) earlier.

You can see that on one system, it was caching 80.77 GiB and the other, I was caching 94.83 GiB.

This is confirmed because when I run:

```auto
# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
```

it clears the cache up right away.

So, yes, Xorg was for some reason taking up a lot of RAM (still not really sure why) so the technical support team from SuSE suggested that I switch over to run level 3 to see if this is still happening, and it is.

I found this site:  
[http://www.linuxatemyram.com/](http://www.linuxatemyram.com/)

The table near the bottom which shows that cached objects in RAM as being used RAM and so for some strange reason, someone, in their infinite wisdom, decided to denote cached objects (pagecache and slab objects) as such and so, the memory manager (vm) WON’T release the RAM via a cache purge automatically which means that large memory programs like scientific/engineering analysis programs would end up needing to swap but not enough RAM is free/available.

Your last statement is correct.

I think that even when you install SLES, if you try to install it without swap, it gives you a warning against doing something like that.

Being that I also come from a predominantly Windows background (moreso than Linux or Solaris), I know that Windows REALLY hates it if it doesn’t have swap available, even with large memory systems.

I’m not sure if Linux will behave “appropriately” in the absence of a swap partition.

Conversely, nowadays with PCI Express SSDs, swapping isn’t quite as big of a deal as it once was. Still sucks, but it’s MUCH better than the days of asynchronous swapping on a mechanically rotating hard drive at 3-5 MB/s. (I don’t have my PCIe SSD installed in it right now. I wanted to see how well it would do without it in case I end up installing an Infiniband card instead.)

To me, /proc/sys/vm/swappiness tells the system how “often” it swaps. What I really want it to do isn’t to swap, but it is to clear the cache so that it will free up the memory so that swap wouldn’t even be an issue. That’s what I was really going for by writing to /proc/sys/vm/vfs\_cache\_pressure (which, since then, I’ve also edited sysctl so that it will be a more permanent change instead, but I am manually writing to that now to test out which setting will work the way I would want/like it to).

Thanks.

(Additional sources:  
[https://gist.github.com/dakull/5629740](https://gist.github.com/dakull/5629740)  
[https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles-12/book\_sle\_tuning/data/cha\_tuning\_memory\_usage.html](https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles-12/book_sle_tuning/data/cha_tuning_memory_usage.html)  
[https://www.suse.com/communities/blog/sles-1112-os-tuning-optimisation-guide-part-1/](https://www.suse.com/communities/blog/sles-1112-os-tuning-optimisation-guide-part-1/))

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ab1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d2c977/32.png) [@ab1](https://forums.suse.com/u/ab1)\
**Post date:** [August 19, 2017, 5:34am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/17 "2017-08-19T05:34:32Z")

</div>

On 08/18/2017 07:14 PM, alpha754293 wrote:[color=blue]

> ## Code:
> 
> aes@aes3:~\> free  
> total used free shared buffers cached  
> Mem: 132066080 122653184 9412896 155376 24 84712440  
> -/+ buffers/cache: 37940720 94125360  
> Swap: 268437500 35108 268402392
> 
> --------------------[/color]

This is showing what we would hope, that swap is basically unused. Sure,  
35 MiB are being used, but that’s just about nothing, and it is probably  
only data which should be swapped, like libraries loaded once and never  
needed again but still needing to be loaded. You could tune swappiness  
further, but I can hardly imagine it will make a big difference since the  
system does not need the memory that is even completely free (9 GiB of it)  
or that is used and freeable by cache (94 GiB).  
[color=blue]

> (I think that you meant /proc/sys/vm/swappiness and that is still at the  
> default value of 60.)[/color]

Change that if you want; sixty (60) is the default I have as well on my  
boxes that I have not tuned, but again I doubt it matters too much since  
the system isn’t using almost any swap currently now that xorg is not  
trying to use all of the virtual memory the system has available.  
[color=blue]

> These were screenshots that I took of the terminal window (ssh) earlier.
> 
> You can see that on one system, it was caching 80.77 GiB and the other,  
> I was caching 94.83 GiB.
> 
> This is confirmed because when I run:
> 
> ## Code:
> 
> # echo 3 \> /proc/sys/vm/drop\_caches
> 
> * * *
> 
> it clears the cache up right away.[/color]

Yes, that makes sense, but I do not understand why there is a perceived  
problem considering the system state now that xorg is stopped. The system  
is not in need of memory, at least not at the time of the snapshot you took.  
[color=blue]

> So, yes, Xorg was for some reason taking up a lot of RAM (still not  
> really sure why) so the technical support team from SuSE suggested that  
> I switch over to run level 3 to see if this is still happening, and it  
> is.[/color]

I think it may be useful to go back to runlevel five (5) again but without  
running anything in it; I suspect it will not show the symptom unless you  
run your program in there again. Something about that is probably causing  
the memory leak, and thus asking the system for all possible memory to the  
detriment of everything. Eventually I would guess the kernel would use  
the Out Of Memory (OOM) killer to kill xorg in order to free up what is  
obviously the biggest memory consumer.  
[color=blue]

> I found this site:  
> [http://www.linuxatemyram.com/](http://www.linuxatemyram.com/)
> 
> The table near the bottom which shows that cached objects in RAM as  
> being used RAM and so for some strange reason, someone, in their  
> infinite wisdom, decided to denote cached objects (pagecache and slab  
> objects) as such and so, the memory manager (vm) WON’T release the RAM  
> via a cache purge automatically which means that large memory programs  
> like scientific/engineering analysis programs would end up needing to  
> swap but not enough RAM is free/available.
> 
> Your last statement is correct.
> 
> I think that even when you install SLES, if you try to install it  
> without swap, it gives you a warning against doing something like that.[/color]

Yes, it does, and I thin it does because nobody has bothered to remove it,  
and also because in general having a little (2 GiB is standard I think)  
swap partition just in case.  
[color=blue]

> Being that I also come from a predominantly Windows background (moreso  
> than Linux or Solaris), I know that Windows REALLY hates it if it  
> doesn’t have swap available, even with large memory systems.
> 
> I’m not sure if Linux will behave “appropriately” in the absence of a  
> swap partition.[/color]

Every box I’ve built in the past several years (ten or so?) has had  
minimal or no swap at all, except for my laptop where I have a swap simply  
because I hibernate (suspend to disk) often. Probably half of the box  
I’ve setup in that time have had no swap at all and are all either  
running, or been retired and replaced because of hardware dying. I  
stopped using swap, as much as possible, years ago because of the issues  
I’ve mentioned before where the performance suffered when some program  
(xorg in your case) gets out of control made using the system, even to  
kill that problematic process, too much of a problem to stand. Anyway,  
Linux seems to do fine, particularly if you want to tune the swappiness  
down to one (1) or zero (0) since that should mean swap is only used as a  
last resort; my laptop has it set to zero (0).  
[color=blue]

> Conversely, nowadays with PCI Express SSDs, swapping isn’t quite as big  
> of a deal as it once was. Still sucks, but it’s MUCH better than the  
> days of asynchronous swapping on a mechanically rotating hard drive at  
> 3-5 MB/s. (I don’t have my PCIe SSD installed in it right now. I wanted  
> to see how well it would do without it in case I end up installing an  
> Infiniband card instead.)[/color]

Sure, but 250+ GiB of it? If your system needs that much swap, even if  
you are using SSDs, something is amiss and writing at one GB/s is still  
not that fast compared to what RAM can do. I just did a test on a REALLY  
old box that was never server-class hardware and even it can write to RAM  
at 3 GiB/s and it would probably take striped SSDs today to keep up with  
that, or modern RAM should be able to go much faster, maybe an order of  
magnitude or more.  
[color=blue]

> To me, /proc/sys/vm/swappiness tells the system how “often” it swaps.  
> What I really want it to do isn’t to swap, but it is to clear the cache  
> so that it will free up the memory so that swap wouldn’t even be an  
> issue. That’s what I was really going for by writing to  
> /proc/sys/vm/vfs\_cache\_pressure (which, since then, I’ve also edited  
> sysctl so that it will be a more permanent change instead, but I am  
> manually writing to that now to test out which setting will work the way  
> I would want/like it to).[/color]

Set swappiness to zero (0) and it will only be used if really needed; the  
system may still use cache, and in my testing it frees that at the drop of  
a hat for any user process that needs it (‘root’-owned or otherwise), but  
at least you will never have swap be used until that time. My laptop runs  
VMs, monster Java processes, this Thunderbird tool (subscribed to a  
hundred groups and a half-dozen e-mail accounts), Firefox (with a dozen  
tabs), Tomboy with a few thousand notes, Pidgin, konsole with a dozen tabs  
and infinite scollback, and as much else as I can throw at it, and it  
never uses swap unless a process runs away, at which time I still wish it  
were dead despite a decent, but not new/modern, SSD.

I need to read up more on the vfs\_cache\_pressure stuff, but ultimately I  
would take your system, cut back the swap as much as possible (you’re into  
high performance, to use high-performance (non-swap) memory only by sizing  
for it as you have done), and then keep xorg from building up memory by  
not running that program within it, or not running it at all (it is a  
server after all; you do not need a GUI full time), but that is just me.

It is interesting hearing about your experience, and what you are seeing,  
and particularly in this little HPC environment so, no matter which route  
you choose, thank-you for sharing what you have so far.

–  
Good luck.

If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
show your appreciation and click on the star below.

If you want to send me a private message, please let me know in the  
forum as I do not use the web interface often.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![alpha754293](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@alpha754293](https://forums.suse.com/u/alpha754293)\
**Post date:** [August 21, 2017, 3:33am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/18 "2017-08-21T03:33:11Z")

</div>

[QUOTE=ab;39171]On 08/18/2017 07:14 PM, alpha754293 wrote:[color=blue]

> ## Code:
> 
> aes@aes3:~\> free  
> total used free shared buffers cached  
> Mem: 132066080 122653184 9412896 155376 24 84712440  
> -/+ buffers/cache: 37940720 94125360  
> Swap: 268437500 35108 268402392
> 
> --------------------[/color]

This is showing what we would hope, that swap is basically unused. Sure,  
35 MiB are being used, but that’s just about nothing, and it is probably  
only data which should be swapped, like libraries loaded once and never  
needed again but still needing to be loaded. You could tune swappiness  
further, but I can hardly imagine it will make a big difference since the  
system does not need the memory that is even completely free (9 GiB of it)  
or that is used and freeable by cache (94 GiB).  
[color=blue]

> (I think that you meant /proc/sys/vm/swappiness and that is still at the  
> default value of 60.)[/color]

Change that if you want; sixty (60) is the default I have as well on my  
boxes that I have not tuned, but again I doubt it matters too much since  
the system isn’t using almost any swap currently now that xorg is not  
trying to use all of the virtual memory the system has available.[/quote]

Xorg isn’t using it, but cache is (pagecache and slab objects) - 81.74 GiB of it to be precise.

So when an application is going to make a request for ca. 70 GiB of RAM, let’s say, and since the system only has 128 GB installed, it’s going to push any new demands on the RAM into swap and this is where it becomes a problem.

See below for further commentary re: swappiness.

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> These were screenshots that I took of the terminal window (ssh) earlier.
> 
> You can see that on one system, it was caching 80.77 GiB and the other,  
> I was caching 94.83 GiB.
> 
> This is confirmed because when I run:
> 
> ## Code:
> 
> # echo 3 \> /proc/sys/vm/drop\_caches
> 
> * * *
> 
> it clears the cache up right away.[/color]

Yes, that makes sense, but I do not understand why there is a perceived  
problem considering the system state now that xorg is stopped. The system  
is not in need of memory, at least not at the time of the snapshot you took.[/quote]

Again, the root cause of the issue actually isn’t the swap in and of itself. It first manifested as such, especially with X running, but in run level 3, I was able to find out that the root cause of the issue is due to the OS kernel’s vm caching of pagecache and slab objects.

That is the heart of the issue.

If the comment re: perceived problem was re: X running, then okay, sure. But if the comment re: perceived problem is that this is doing it at all, then it isn’t a perceived problem. It is a real and legitimate problem, and again, the root cause of it is the virtual memory management portion of the kernel that manages pagecache and slab objects.

Linux marks the RAM that pagecache and slab objects that are cached into as being RAM that is used (which is TECHNICALLY true). What it DOESN’T do when an application demands the RAM though is that it won’t release the cache a la (# echo 3 \> /proc/sys/vm/drop\_caches) in order to release the cached pagecache and slab objects back to the free memory pool so that it can then be used for/by a USER application.

THAT is the part that it DOESN’T seem to do/be doing.

And that is, to be blunt and frank - stupid.

If you have user applications that require RAM, it should take precedence over the OS’ need/desire to cache pagecache and slab objects.

If there is an underlying performance issue such that it is SIGNIFICANTLY slower for the OS to load those objects WITHOUT it having been cached into RAM first, then you should be fixing THAT as the root cause of the issue, and NOT “masking” it by making the caching of pagecache and slab objects having an apparent HIGHER priority ABOVE user apps.

That is just dumb.

WHYYYY would you architect a system like that?

Yes, I realise that to Linux, it thinks cached objects in RAM = RAM is in USE but it should be intelligent enough to know what it is TRULY being used vs. what’s only cached so that the cache can be cleared and the subsequent memory/RAM is released back into the free/available pool so that user apps can use it.

THAT is the root cause of the underlying issue.

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> So, yes, Xorg was for some reason taking up a lot of RAM (still not  
> really sure why) so the technical support team from SuSE suggested that  
> I switch over to run level 3 to see if this is still happening, and it  
> is.[/color]

I think it may be useful to go back to runlevel five (5) again but without  
running anything in it; I suspect it will not show the symptom unless you  
run your program in there again. Something about that is probably causing  
the memory leak, and thus asking the system for all possible memory to the  
detriment of everything. Eventually I would guess the kernel would use  
the Out Of Memory (OOM) killer to kill xorg in order to free up what is  
obviously the biggest memory consumer.[/quote]

I disagree.

The console output of “free” actually tells you that on one of the nodes, it has cached 81.74 GiB of objects and the other has cached well…it WAS 94.83 GiB, now it is 116.31 GiB.

Here is the output of ps aux for that node:

```auto
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.0 116160 4960 ? Ss Aug15 0:13 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --switched-root --system --deserialize 21
root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [kthreadd]
root 3 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:02 [ksoftirqd/0]
root 5 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/0:0H]
root 7 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:30 [kworker/u33:0]
root 8 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:03 [migration/0]
root 9 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [rcu_bh]
root 10 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 4:47 [rcu_sched]
root 11 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/0]
root 12 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/1]
root 13 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/1]
root 14 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [ksoftirqd/1]
root 16 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/1:0H]
root 17 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/2]
root 18 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/2]
root 19 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [ksoftirqd/2]
root 21 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/2:0H]
root 22 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/3]
root 23 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/3]
root 24 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [ksoftirqd/3]
root 26 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/3:0H]
root 27 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/4]
root 28 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/4]
root 29 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [ksoftirqd/4]
root 31 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/4:0H]
root 32 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/5]
root 33 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/5]
root 34 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [ksoftirqd/5]
root 36 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/5:0H]
root 37 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/6]
root 38 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/6]
root 39 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [ksoftirqd/6]
root 41 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/6:0H]
root 42 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/7]
root 43 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/7]
root 44 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [ksoftirqd/7]
root 46 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/7:0H]
root 47 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/8]
root 48 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:04 [migration/8]
root 49 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:02 [ksoftirqd/8]
root 51 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/8:0H]
root 53 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/9]
root 54 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/9]
root 55 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:01 [ksoftirqd/9]
root 57 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/9:0H]
root 58 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/10]
root 59 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/10]
root 60 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [ksoftirqd/10]
root 62 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/10:0H]
root 63 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/11]
root 64 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/11]
root 65 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [ksoftirqd/11]
root 67 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/11:0H]
root 68 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/12]
root 69 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/12]
root 70 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [ksoftirqd/12]
root 72 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/12:0H]
root 73 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/13]
root 74 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/13]
root 75 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [ksoftirqd/13]
root 77 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/13:0H]
root 78 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/14]
root 79 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/14]
root 80 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [ksoftirqd/14]
root 82 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/14:0H]
root 83 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [watchdog/15]
root 84 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [migration/15]
root 85 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [ksoftirqd/15]
root 87 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/15:0H]
root 88 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [khelper]
root 89 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [kdevtmpfs]
root 90 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [netns]
root 91 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [perf]
root 92 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [writeback]
root 93 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kintegrityd]
root 94 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [bioset]
root 95 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [crypto]
root 96 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kblockd]
root 101 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kgraft]
root 102 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [khungtaskd]
root 104 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:06 [kswapd0]
root 105 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:02 [kswapd1]
root 106 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SN Aug15 0:00 [ksmd]
root 107 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SN Aug15 0:00 [khugepaged]
root 108 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [fsnotify_mark]
root 118 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kthrotld]
root 128 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kpsmoused]
root 129 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [print/0]
root 130 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [print/1]
root 150 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [deferwq]
root 151 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:21 [kworker/14:1]
root 188 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [kauditd]
root 301 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [ata_sff]
root 304 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [khubd]
root 310 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [ttm_swap]
root 348 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [scsi_eh_0]
root 349 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [scsi_tmf_0]
root 350 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [scsi_wq_0]
root 352 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [scsi_eh_1]
root 353 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [scsi_tmf_1]
root 354 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [scsi_eh_2]
root 355 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [scsi_tmf_2]
root 356 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [scsi_eh_3]
root 357 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [scsi_tmf_3]
root 358 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [scsi_eh_4]
root 359 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [scsi_tmf_4]
root 360 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [scsi_eh_5]
root 361 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [scsi_tmf_5]
root 362 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [scsi_eh_6]
root 363 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [scsi_tmf_6]
root 388 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/0:1H]
root 389 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/11:1H]
root 390 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/14:1H]
root 391 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/15:1H]
root 392 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/8:1H]
root 397 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [bioset]
root 398 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/9:1H]
root 410 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/10:1H]
root 417 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-genwork-1]
root 418 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-submit-1]
root 419 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-delalloc-]
root 420 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-fixup-1]
root 422 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 423 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-rmw-1]
root 424 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-endio-rai]
root 425 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 427 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:01 [btrfs-freespace]
root 428 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-delayed-m]
root 429 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-cache-1]
root 430 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-readahead]
root 431 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-flush_del]
root 432 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-qgroup-re]
root 433 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/12:1H]
root 434 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/13:1H]
root 435 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-cleaner]
root 436 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:35 [btrfs-transacti]
root 525 0.0 0.0 43400 9568 ? SLs Aug15 0:02 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journald
root 533 0.0 0.0 21732 960 ? Ss Aug15 0:14 /sbin/dmeventd -f
root 539 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-endio-2]
root 545 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug18 0:05 [kworker/10:2]
root 557 0.0 0.0 42940 2436 ? Ss Aug15 0:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-udevd
root 759 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [edac-poller]
root 760 0.0 0.0 12032 3792 ? Ss Aug15 0:39 /usr/sbin/haveged -w 1024 -v 0 -F
root 925 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kvm-irqfd-clean]
root 1805 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SN Aug15 0:00 [kipmi0]
root 1843 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-genwork-1]
root 1844 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:02 [btrfs-submit-1]
root 1845 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-delalloc-]
root 1846 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-fixup-1]
root 1847 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-endio-1]
root 1848 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 1849 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-rmw-1]
root 1850 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-endio-rai]
root 1851 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-endio-met]
root 1852 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:04 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 1853 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:01 [btrfs-freespace]
root 1854 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-delayed-m]
root 1855 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-cache-1]
root 1856 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-readahead]
root 1857 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-flush_del]
root 1858 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-qgroup-re]
root 1866 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-cleaner]
root 1867 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:33 [btrfs-transacti]
message+ 2073 0.0 0.0 42920 2924 ? SLs Aug15 0:03 /bin/dbus-daemon --system --address=systemd: --nofork --nopidfile --systemd-activation
avahi 2076 0.0 0.0 20076 1724 ? Ss Aug15 0:24 avahi-daemon: running [aes2.local]
root 2078 0.0 0.0 24964 2708 ? Ss Aug15 0:00 /usr/sbin/smartd -n
root 2081 0.0 0.0 19304 1232 ? Ss Aug15 0:42 /usr/sbin/irqbalance --foreground
nscd 2084 0.0 0.0 802360 1456 ? Ssl Aug15 0:02 /usr/sbin/nscd
root 2085 0.0 0.0 29488 3184 ? SLs Aug15 0:00 /usr/lib/wicked/bin/wickedd-dhcp6 --systemd --foreground
root 2088 0.0 0.0 29488 3424 ? SLs Aug15 0:00 /usr/lib/wicked/bin/wickedd-dhcp4 --systemd --foreground
root 2099 0.0 0.0 29488 3188 ? SLs Aug15 0:00 /usr/lib/wicked/bin/wickedd-auto4 --systemd --foreground
root 2121 0.0 0.0 20096 1584 ? Ss Aug15 0:02 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-logind
root 2122 0.0 0.0 4440 768 tty1 Ss+ Aug15 0:00 /sbin/agetty --noclear tty1 linux
root 2126 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 17:45 0:00 [kworker/0:0]
root 2149 0.0 0.0 337852 2484 ? SLsl Aug15 0:00 /usr/sbin/rsyslogd -n
root 2151 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/4:1H]
root 2152 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/6:1H]
root 2156 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/5:1H]
root 2158 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/2:1H]
root 2159 0.0 0.0 29612 3568 ? SLs Aug15 0:00 /usr/sbin/wickedd --systemd --foreground
root 2169 0.0 0.0 29516 3280 ? SLs Aug15 0:00 /usr/sbin/wickedd-nanny --systemd --foreground
root 2207 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [kworker/u34:1]
root 2322 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug15 0:00 [kworker/3:1H]
root 2991 0.0 0.0 437608 15460 ? SLsl Aug15 0:00 /usr/sbin/libvirtd --listen
root 3022 0.0 0.0 46896 3136 ? Ss Aug15 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd -D
root 3100 0.0 0.0 19608 1212 ? Ss Aug15 0:01 /usr/lib/postfix/master -w
postfix 3102 0.0 0.0 21856 2268 ? S Aug15 0:00 qmgr -l -t fifo -u
root 3129 0.0 0.0 18820 1492 ? Ss Aug15 0:00 /usr/sbin/cron -n
root 3472 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug19 0:00 [kworker/u32:1]
root 3538 0.6 0.1 812836 141660 ? Ssl Aug15 47:40 /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/linx64/ansysli_server
root 3550 0.0 0.0 19064 3592 ? Ss Aug15 1:58 /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/linx64/ansysli_monitor -monitor 3538 -restart_port_timeout 15
root 3584 0.0 0.0 16780 2692 ? S Aug15 0:04 /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/linx64/lmgrd -c /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/license_files -l /usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/license.log
root 3585 0.0 0.0 127816 7376 ? Ssl Aug15 0:32 ansyslmd -T aes2 11.13 3 -c :/usr/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/license_files: -srv LgFV2wwMa2iyCVChj6LuclIeIH7uSthmAgsCjVUTJXsEnEgIdOrnsb832BA3Cnw --lmgrd_start 5993c175 -vdrestart 0
root 4180 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 18:00 0:00 [kworker/7:0]
root 5142 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug16 0:00 [kworker/1:1H]
root 5601 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 10:00 0:00 [kworker/1:0]
root 5943 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:00 [btrfs-worker-4]
root 6095 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Aug16 0:00 [kworker/7:1H]
root 6123 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 18:15 0:00 [kworker/9:1]
root 6960 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 14:15 0:00 [kworker/6:0]
root 6961 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug17 0:11 [kworker/15:2]
root 7459 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug15 0:05 [kworker/u34:2]
root 7532 0.0 0.0 87676 4088 ? Ss Aug15 0:00 sshd: ewen [priv]
ewen 7541 0.0 0.0 87676 1780 ? S Aug15 0:00 sshd: ewen@pts/0
ewen 7542 0.0 0.0 14316 3204 pts/0 Ss Aug15 0:00 -bash
root 7848 0.0 0.0 87676 4088 ? Ss Aug16 0:00 sshd: ewen [priv]
ewen 7857 0.0 0.0 87676 1780 ? S Aug16 0:00 sshd: ewen@pts/1
ewen 7858 0.0 0.0 14316 3228 pts/1 Ss Aug16 0:00 -bash
root 8117 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 18:30 0:00 [kworker/11:1]
root 8120 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 18:30 0:00 [kworker/2:1]
root 8904 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 14:30 0:01 [kworker/1:1]
root 9949 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug16 0:00 [kworker/14:2]
root 10053 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 18:45 0:00 [kworker/8:0]
postfix 10362 0.0 0.0 21464 1376 ? S 18:47 0:00 pickup -l -t fifo -u
root 10405 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug19 0:04 [kworker/15:0]
root 10968 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 18:51 0:00 [btrfs-endio-wri]
root 12052 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:00 0:00 [kworker/9:2]
ewen 12054 0.0 0.0 118380 80776 pts/0 S+ Aug16 0:02 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/../tools/perl-5.8.0-1/bin/Linux-x86_64/perl -Sx /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/cfx5solve -batch -par-local -part 16 -def Transient.def
ewen 12190 0.3 0.0 14368 1328 pts/0 S+ Aug16 21:15 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/commonfiles/MPI/IBM/9.1.4.2/linx64/bin/mpirun -f /export/home/work/Aerosmart/International 9200i 2006 (solid model) flow regime (wo bubble) CFX mesh2a_files/dp0/CFX-1/CFX/Transient_001.dir/appfile
ewen 12193 0.2 0.0 48240 1692 pts/0 S+ Aug16 18:12 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/commonfiles/MPI/IBM/9.1.4.2/linx64/bin/mpid 0 0 151061506 192.168.1.157 30519 12190 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/commonfiles/MPI/IBM/9.1.4.2/linx64
ewen 12288 99.6 3.0 4422964 4068788 pts/0 Rl+ Aug16 6892:24 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12289 99.8 0.2 474100 366268 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6904:11 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12290 99.8 0.2 464608 356372 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6904:49 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12291 99.7 0.2 456024 345484 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6897:07 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12292 99.7 0.2 473756 363616 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6898:48 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12293 99.7 0.2 473668 358092 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6898:28 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12294 99.7 0.2 463792 352588 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6899:14 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12295 99.8 0.2 454192 346016 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6904:35 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12296 99.7 0.2 458876 349376 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6897:50 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12297 99.7 0.2 460728 351572 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6898:57 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12298 99.8 0.2 461312 353512 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6904:47 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12299 99.8 0.2 458340 347260 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6903:56 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12300 99.8 0.2 475320 362708 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6903:35 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12301 99.8 0.2 476804 367708 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6902:37 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12302 99.8 0.2 473872 364996 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6903:42 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
ewen 12303 99.7 0.2 478276 368140 pts/0 R+ Aug16 6900:52 /usr/ansys_inc/v180/CFX/bin/linux-amd64/ifort/solver-mpi.exe -par -pri 2 -outopt 0 -nojob
root 14379 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:17 0:00 [btrfs-worker-2]
root 15671 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug19 0:04 [kworker/10:1]
root 16017 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:30 0:00 [kworker/8:2]
root 16864 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 15:30 0:00 [kworker/u32:2]
root 17085 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug18 0:02 [kworker/11:2]
root 17146 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug19 0:05 [kworker/12:2]
root 17956 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:45 0:00 [kworker/5:2]
root 17959 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:45 0:00 [kworker/4:2]
root 18147 0.2 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:46 0:00 [btrfs-worker-2]
root 18148 0.2 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:46 0:00 [btrfs-worker-3]
root 18149 0.1 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:46 0:00 [btrfs-worker-4]
root 18150 0.1 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:46 0:00 [btrfs-worker-5]
root 18151 0.1 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:46 0:00 [btrfs-worker-6]
root 18152 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:46 0:00 [btrfs-worker-7]
root 18153 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 19:46 0:00 [btrfs-worker-8]
ewen 18249 57.1 0.0 26696 1864 pts/1 RL+ 19:46 0:00 ps aux
root 18790 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 15:45 0:00 [kworker/2:0]
root 20277 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug19 0:00 [kworker/12:0]
root 22717 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 16:15 0:00 [kworker/0:1]
root 23515 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:15 0:01 [kworker/7:2]
root 23790 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug18 0:08 [kworker/13:1]
root 24125 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 08:15 0:01 [kworker/5:0]
root 26351 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug18 0:00 [kworker/u33:2]
root 26967 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug19 0:01 [kworker/5:1]
root 27446 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 12:45 0:00 [kworker/3:2]
root 27935 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Aug16 0:00 [kworker/13:2]
root 28047 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 08:45 0:02 [kworker/4:0]
root 28649 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 17:00 0:00 [kworker/6:1]
root 30856 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 05:00 0:00 [kworker/4:1]
root 31394 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 13:15 0:01 [kworker/3:0]
```

```auto
$ cat /proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure
200
```

```auto
$ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
60
```

I highly doubt 116.31 GiB of cached objects is a “perceived” problem.

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> I found this site:  
> [http://www.linuxatemyram.com/](http://www.linuxatemyram.com/)
> 
> The table near the bottom which shows that cached objects in RAM as  
> being used RAM and so for some strange reason, someone, in their  
> infinite wisdom, decided to denote cached objects (pagecache and slab  
> objects) as such and so, the memory manager (vm) WON’T release the RAM  
> via a cache purge automatically which means that large memory programs  
> like scientific/engineering analysis programs would end up needing to  
> swap but not enough RAM is free/available.
> 
> Your last statement is correct.
> 
> I think that even when you install SLES, if you try to install it  
> without swap, it gives you a warning against doing something like that.[/color]

Yes, it does, and I thin it does because nobody has bothered to remove it,  
and also because in general having a little (2 GiB is standard I think)  
swap partition just in case.  
[color=blue]

> Being that I also come from a predominantly Windows background (moreso  
> than Linux or Solaris), I know that Windows REALLY hates it if it  
> doesn’t have swap available, even with large memory systems.
> 
> I’m not sure if Linux will behave “appropriately” in the absence of a  
> swap partition.[/color]

Every box I’ve built in the past several years (ten or so?) has had  
minimal or no swap at all, except for my laptop where I have a swap simply  
because I hibernate (suspend to disk) often. Probably half of the box  
I’ve setup in that time have had no swap at all and are all either  
running, or been retired and replaced because of hardware dying. I  
stopped using swap, as much as possible, years ago because of the issues  
I’ve mentioned before where the performance suffered when some program  
(xorg in your case) gets out of control made using the system, even to  
kill that problematic process, too much of a problem to stand. Anyway,  
Linux seems to do fine, particularly if you want to tune the swappiness  
down to one (1) or zero (0) since that should mean swap is only used as a  
last resort; my laptop has it set to zero (0).  
[color=blue]

> Conversely, nowadays with PCI Express SSDs, swapping isn’t quite as big  
> of a deal as it once was. Still sucks, but it’s MUCH better than the  
> days of asynchronous swapping on a mechanically rotating hard drive at  
> 3-5 MB/s. (I don’t have my PCIe SSD installed in it right now. I wanted  
> to see how well it would do without it in case I end up installing an  
> Infiniband card instead.)[/color]

Sure, but 250+ GiB of it? If your system needs that much swap, even if  
you are using SSDs, something is amiss and writing at one GB/s is still  
not that fast compared to what RAM can do. I just did a test on a REALLY  
old box that was never server-class hardware and even it can write to RAM  
at 3 GiB/s and it would probably take striped SSDs today to keep up with  
that, or modern RAM should be able to go much faster, maybe an order of  
magnitude or more.[/quote]

So…yes and no.

I keep the swap around only because in the cases that I am currently running, I know how much memory they take to run, but that’s generally NOT the case (i.e. I don’t have a good estimate of how much memory it will need before I submit the analysis run/job.)

The system has been spec’d in anticipation of larger memory runs, but there is also a possibility that even 128 GB will be insufficient. Yay engineering?

So I upgraded the RAM to a cost-effective solution - it isn’t the most RAM that it can take, but it also isn’t the lowest cost either.

In my case, swap exists in the event of an analysis requiring more memory than is physically available.

[quote=ab][color=blue]

> To me, /proc/sys/vm/swappiness tells the system how “often” it swaps.  
> What I really want it to do isn’t to swap, but it is to clear the cache  
> so that it will free up the memory so that swap wouldn’t even be an  
> issue. That’s what I was really going for by writing to  
> /proc/sys/vm/vfs\_cache\_pressure (which, since then, I’ve also edited  
> sysctl so that it will be a more permanent change instead, but I am  
> manually writing to that now to test out which setting will work the way  
> I would want/like it to).[/color]

Set swappiness to zero (0) and it will only be used if really needed; the  
system may still use cache, and in my testing it frees that at the drop of  
a hat for any user process that needs it (‘root’-owned or otherwise), but  
at least you will never have swap be used until that time. My laptop runs  
VMs, monster Java processes, this Thunderbird tool (subscribed to a  
hundred groups and a half-dozen e-mail accounts), Firefox (with a dozen  
tabs), Tomboy with a few thousand notes, Pidgin, konsole with a dozen tabs  
and infinite scollback, and as much else as I can throw at it, and it  
never uses swap unless a process runs away, at which time I still wish it  
were dead despite a decent, but not new/modern, SSD.

I need to read up more on the vfs\_cache\_pressure stuff, but ultimately I  
would take your system, cut back the swap as much as possible (you’re into  
high performance, to use high-performance (non-swap) memory only by sizing  
for it as you have done), and then keep xorg from building up memory by  
not running that program within it, or not running it at all (it is a  
server after all; you do not need a GUI full time), but that is just me.

It is interesting hearing about your experience, and what you are seeing,  
and particularly in this little HPC environment so, no matter which route  
you choose, thank-you for sharing what you have so far.

–  
Good luck.

If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
show your appreciation and click on the star below.

If you want to send me a private message, please let me know in the  
forum as I do not use the web interface often.[/QUOTE]

You’re welcome.

Yeah, I can try changing the swappiness to zero as well.

It was my understanding that it only controlled how likely it was going to swap, not whether or not it was going to swap.

Put it this way - even with 128 GB of RAM, SLES has been able to consume ALL of it in one form or another. I just wished that it was more biased towards user apps rather than OS/kernel vm caching.

Like I understand, at a very high level why this problem exists in the Linux kernel (because it doesn’t distinguish the difference between RAM that is used by user apps vs. RAM that is used due to caching - it just sees the RAM as being used), but it should have been architected more intelligently such that when there is an application that is requesting for more RAM than is currently available, one of the first thing the OS should be trying to do is clear out the cache - which it currently doesn’t seem to automatically do.

(It was also my interpretation that vfs\_cache\_pressure was supposed to do that, but with a value of ‘200’ set in /proc/sys/vm/vfs\_cache\_pressure and it is STILL caching like mad, something tells me that there is still more testing that needs to be done. Downside is that my suite of tests (via batch processing/shell script) takes about 4.5 days to run with each pass, so…I am reluctant to want to test the system settings slowly because I need to quickly load up the system and just as quickly - need the OS to start caching as well.)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ab1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d2c977/32.png) [@ab1](https://forums.suse.com/u/ab1)\
**Post date:** [August 21, 2017, 7:14am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/19 "2017-08-21T07:14:34Z")

</div>

On 08/20/2017 06:34 PM, alpha754293 wrote:[color=blue]

> ab;39171 Wrote:[color=green]
> 
> > On 08/18/2017 07:14 PM, alpha754293 wrote:[color=darkred]
> > 
> > > ## Code:
> > > 
> > > aes@aes3:~\> free  
> > > total used free shared buffers[/color]  
> > > cached[color=darkred]  
> > > Mem: 132066080 122653184 9412896 155376 24[/color]  
> > > 84712440[color=darkred]  
> > > -/+ buffers/cache: 37940720 94125360  
> > > Swap: 268437500 35108 268402392
> > > 
> > > --------------------[/color]
> > 
> > This is showing what we would hope, that swap is basically unused.  
> > Sure,  
> > 35 MiB are being used, but that’s just about nothing, and it is  
> > probably  
> > only data which should be swapped, like libraries loaded once and never  
> > needed again but still needing to be loaded. You could tune swappiness  
> > further, but I can hardly imagine it will make a big difference since  
> > the  
> > system does not need the memory that is even completely free (9 GiB of  
> > it)  
> > or that is used and freeable by cache (94 GiB).  
> > [color=darkred]
> > 
> > > (I think that you meant /proc/sys/vm/swappiness and that is still at[/color]  
> > > the[color=darkred]  
> > > default value of 60.)[/color]
> > 
> > Change that if you want; sixty (60) is the default I have as well on my  
> > boxes that I have not tuned, but again I doubt it matters too much  
> > since  
> > the system isn’t using almost any swap currently now that xorg is not  
> > trying to use all of the virtual memory the system has available.[/color]
> 
> Xorg isn’t using it, but cache is (pagecache and slab objects) - 81.74  
> GiB of it to be precise.[/color]

I think we were talking about different “it” things here; I was talking  
about swap, and on this current system almost nothing is using swap.  
Sure, when you were running your analysis program under xorg it was xorg  
taking up both RAM and swap, but that was not usual at all because xorg, a  
user program, thought it needed (NEEDED) 333977404 KB of RAM, meaning 333  
GB all by itself. That’s not normal, and only indicative (usually) of a  
memory leak. In that case your kernel was not holding onto either RAM or  
swap to the chagrin of xorg, but rather, as I would expect, it had  
probably freed up as much RAM as possible from cache and given it to xorg,  
which had happily used it terribly. There’s no fix for this other than to  
fix the xorg bug, but it shows that the system did not hold onto cache  
while keeping memory (RAM) from a user application, and this is how it  
should work. Things are cached when nothing else needs the RAM, but the  
system will free it at the drop of a hat when something important  
(basically anything) needs it.  
[color=blue]

> So when an application is going to make a request for ca. 70 GiB of RAM,  
> let’s say, and since the system only has 128 GB installed, it’s going to  
> push any new demands on the RAM into swap and this is where it becomes a  
> problem.[/color]

I would agree that it would be a problem, but I think your own xorg  
example shows that is not the case. Yes, you were using lots of swap on  
the system at that time, but you were also using all of your RAM (or  
nearly so). If xorg had been denied RAM because the system just had to  
cache things, xorg would have crashed like any application that needed RAM  
and was denied it from the OS. More below to prove this, though.  
[color=blue]

> ab Wrote:[color=green]
> 
> > [color=darkred]
> > 
> > > These were screenshots that I took of the terminal window (ssh)[/color]  
> > > earlier.[color=darkred]
> > > 
> > > You can see that on one system, it was caching 80.77 GiB and the[/color]  
> > > other,[color=darkred]  
> > > I was caching 94.83 GiB.
> > > 
> > > This is confirmed because when I run:
> > > 
> > > ## Code:
> > > 
> > > # echo 3 \> /proc/sys/vm/drop\_caches
> > > 
> > > * * *
> > > 
> > > it clears the cache up right away.[/color]
> > 
> > Yes, that makes sense, but I do not understand why there is a perceived  
> > problem considering the system state now that xorg is stopped. The  
> > system  
> > is not in need of memory, at least not at the time of the snapshot you  
> > took.[/color]
> 
> Again, the root cause of the issue actually isn’t the swap in and of  
> itself. It first manifested as such, especially with X running, but in  
> run level 3, I was able to find out that the root cause of the issue is  
> due to the OS kernel’s vm caching of pagecache and slab objects.[/color]

I do not see how you reached this conclusion. I see RAM being used, and  
by cache, but I also do not see anything in your last bit of output that  
shows anything wanting to use all of the RAM, so everybody is running in  
RAM, and that’s good (I’m ignoring those tiny 35 MiB of swap because it’s  
almost nothing). System performance went down when swap was heavily used  
by xorg, yes, but that only happened because xorg wanted nearly 3x your  
system RAM, so it was given a lot of RAM and way more swap, because your  
swap is (in my opinion) way too big. If you were to start a new HPC job  
that needed that much memory, you’d have similar results, but worse  
because your programs probably actually use the RAM heavily, rather than  
just filling it, and swap, once.  
[color=blue]

> Linux marks the RAM that pagecache and slab objects that are cached into  
> as being RAM that is used (which is TECHNICALLY true). What it DOESN’T  
> do when an application demands the RAM though is that it won’t release  
> the cache a la (# echo 3 \> /proc/sys/vm/drop\_caches) in order to release  
> the cached pagecache and slab objects back to the free memory pool so  
> that it can then be used for/by a USER application.
> 
> THAT is the part that it DOESN’T seem to do/be doing.
> 
> And that is, to be blunt and frank - stupid.[/color]

If true, it would be a terrible thing for sure, but I have never seen  
Linux do this, and I’ve tested it many times; as mentioned above, I think  
your xorg example also shows this, but you disagree so I would like to  
figure out if my conceptions are all wrong, or if you are, perhaps,  
interpreting differently than I am and perhaps we can find some agreement.  
[color=blue]

> If you have user applications that require RAM, it should take  
> precedence over the OS’ need/desire to cache pagecache and slab  
> objects.[/color]

This is what I have always seen over the years; let’s test it.  
[color=blue]

> Yes, I realise that to Linux, it thinks cached objects in RAM = RAM is  
> in USE but it should be intelligent enough to know what it is TRULY  
> being used vs. what’s only cached so that the cache can be cleared and  
> the subsequent memory/RAM is released back into the free/available pool  
> so that user apps can use it.
> 
> THAT is the root cause of the underlying issue.[/color]

No, Linux definitely sees the difference between cached objects in RAM and  
everything else in RAM; if that were not the case, the ‘free’ command  
could never show you, as any old user, how much of RAM is being used for  
mere caching/buffers, and of course it does.  
[color=blue]

> The console output of “free” actually tells you that on one of the  
> nodes, it has cached 81.74 GiB of objects and the other has cached  
> well…it WAS 94.83 GiB, now it is 116.31 GiB.[/color]

I cannot see this picture for whatever reason; maybe host it on another  
site, unless you can just paste it as text (if it was already text).  
[color=blue]

> Here is the output of ps aux for that node:[/color]

The node from which you posted the ps output looks fine to me. As far as  
I can tell, the ‘ps’ output shows that this node is using either 15212268  
KB (15 GiB) of VSZ, or 9759828 (9 GiB) Resident memory. If that 9 GiB is  
added on top of 116 GiB cached data, you are stll not using all of your  
RAM. Seeing the ‘free’ output would probably show this as well. Sure,  
maybe SOME swap was being used, but I would be very surprised if it was  
using swap heavily, but still we need to test this.  
[color=blue]

> ## Code:
> 
> $ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness  
> 60
> 
> --------------------[/color]

Yes, if concerned, at least set this to one (1). Unless you are using a  
lot of swap it will not matter, but at least it will have the system  
prefer RAM more-heavily.  
[color=blue]

> I highly doubt 116.31 GiB of cached objects is a “perceived” problem.[/color]

It definitely is only a perceived problem if your user processes are able  
to take back the RAM when they need it.

In this last bit of ‘ps aux’ output the majority of your solver processes  
are only using something like 300 MiB RAM, so much smaller than before.  
You have one using around 4 GiB, but it’s definitely the biggest thing on  
there. As a result, while your system shows a lot of cache, that is  
because nothing else needs the RAM. Get something to use that RAM and  
watch it free up as if you had told the system to drop caches with the  
echo statement, only just for the amount needed by the program.  
[color=blue]

> In my case, swap exists in the event of an analysis requiring more  
> memory than is physically available.[/color]

Fair enough, as that is a decent purpose for having it, so long as  
everybody understands that it will perform terribly (compared to RAM0 once  
needed. Linux, I am arguing, should delay that time as much as possible,  
preferring RAM until then, with your swappiness value at the default of  
sixty (60).

Ways to est this are varied, but here are a couple. First, on your box  
you should have a /dev/shm (shared memory) mountpoint in which you can  
write anything you want, and normally it is about half the size of your  
system’s RAM (by default), meaning on your box it will be 64 GiB. If your  
system is actually using 10 GiB memory for your processes, but it is  
caching 116 GiB of stuff, your memory is all filled up and anything you do  
will, per my theory, require freeing up RAM. Per your theory, it will  
require using swap. Run the following command to request 25 GiB of RAM  
for a file in that “ramdisk” area and see where it is used:

```auto
free
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/shm/25gib bs=1048576 count=25000
free
```

If my theory is correct, your swap amounts will not change much, and your  
used amount will not change much, but your system will have a lot less  
cached suddenly. Delete the file and then check ‘free’ again:

```auto
rm /dev/shm/25gib
free
```

At this point you probably have 25 GiB RAM (or a bit more) free and swap  
should still be minimally used. Testing this on my system (which has a  
lot less RAM than yours) shows these exact results, and they’re the  
results I’ve seen for years, and come to expect.

Of course, you’re not foolish and realize that writing a file to a ramdisk  
is maybe not exactly the same as any other user process wanting memory.  
The easy test there, of course, is to have something gobble RAM.  
Thankfully, folks have written programs that will do just that for us.  
The original site is gone, but I can paste the code here, you can drop it  
into a file, and then compile it see the results; I just tested it on my  
server and it still works as hoped; warning, running code from weirdos  
online is slightly scary unless you trust them:

```auto
#include <errno.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
char *p;
long i;
size_t n;

/* I'm too bored to do proper cmdline parsing */
if (argc != 2 || atol(argv[1]) <= 0 ) {
fprintf(stderr, "I'm bored... Give me the size of the memory chunk in
KB\
");
return 1;
}
n = 1024 * atol(argv[1]);

if (! (p = malloc(n))) {
perror("malloc failed");
return 2;
}

/* Temp, just want to check malloc */
printf("Malloc was successful\
");
//return 0;

/* Touch all of the buffer, to make sure it gets allocated */
for (i = 0; i < n; i++)
p[i] = 'A';

printf("Allocated and touched buffer, sleeping for 60 sec...\
");
sleep(60);
printf("Done!\
");

return 0;
}
```

Drop that into something like mem-alloc-test.c and then compile it:

```auto
gcc mem-alloc-test.c
```

The resulting executable will be named ‘a.out’ by default, so now run it  
and have it allocate 10 GiB RAM, which in theory you do not have free  
other than if cache is freed up:

```auto
../a.out 10000000 #10 million KBs = 10 GBs or so
```

While it is running, run ‘free’ in another shell and watch the cache get  
freed to make room for this memory-gobbling monster. when it finishes  
(after sixty seconds, or when you hit Ctrl+c) see that you have free  
space, and less cached than when you started.

I think this proves, at least on my systems, that things work as I have  
described. Cache is treated separately, and it is a second-class consumer  
of RAM, and is free up nice and quickly, without using swap.

It is entirely possible your system behaves differently; I have low  
swappiness values, and my boxes are probably older and running older  
versions of SLES than yours, but if that is the case I would like to  
understand why since, as you have noted well, this is a big deal.

Either way, I look forward to better-understanding the memory management here.

–  
Good luck.

If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
show your appreciation and click on the star below.

If you want to send me a private message, please let me know in the  
forum as I do not use the web interface often.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ab1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d2c977/32.png) [@ab1](https://forums.suse.com/u/ab1)\
**Post date:** [August 21, 2017, 7:28am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/memory-leak-issue/30080/20 "2017-08-21T07:28:05Z")

</div>

One tiny addition that you probably need not factor in: if you are running  
that memory-gobbling monster as a non-root user, ulimit settings may  
prevent it from running when it requests those many-GBs of memory. I have  
some of my systems set to limit user apps from asking for more than a few  
GBs of RAM, because it’s rare I need that much for any one application and  
I am happy to override those on an as-needed basis. In your case, you  
already have big programs doing things, so I doubt ulimits are in the way,  
but just in case, keep that in mind.

[CODE[  
ulimit -v 100000000 #100 GiB max  
ulimit -v unlimited #unlimited max  
[/CODE]

–  
Good luck.

If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,  
show your appreciation and click on the star below.

If you want to send me a private message, please let me know in the  
forum as I do not use the web interface often.

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