[Xen-devel] Abnormal memory usage of dom0 under Squeeze leading to crash

[Thomas Goirand <zigo@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

We normally run Lenny dom0 with 384 MB of RAM in our production server.
But as we did few trials with Squeeze, I had the very bad finding that a
Squeeze dom0 requires at least 1024 MB of RAM. As soon as I do something
like "xm mem-set Domain-0 800", my server crashes: OOM starts killing
processes, starting with sshd, then mdadm and so on, then the server
reboots by itself. This enormous amount of RAM isn't normal at all, and
I am wondering what is happening.

If I sort processes by memory usage using top, what I can see is 2 xend
processes taking 1.0 and 1.5% of the RAM (out of 1024 MB). This doesn't
seem to be so much, and I don't understand. My server really shouldn't
behave like this! (we even used to run dom0 with 192 MB of RAM back when
we were using Xen 2.0.7 and sarge...) My concern isn't even the waste of
RAM, but a danger for the stability of the system. It just doesn't feel
right!

I have attached the output of dpkg -l, and my setup script is available
here:

wget
"http://git.gplhost.com/gitweb/?p=mgmt-scripts.git;a=blob_plain;f=scripts/dom0-postinstall-squeeze;hb=2c869ce9d729d80a687f1fbdbf0081e140152b44";
-O dom0-postinstall-squeeze

With both of the above, it's going to be easy to reproduce. As Squeeze
is said to be out in 3 days, it would be great to find out what's going
on and fix asap.

Does anyone have an idea of what's going on? I just don't get it...

Thomas Goirand (zigo)

Attachment: installed_packages.txt
Description: Text document

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