Forum OpenACS Q&A: RH Enterprise Linux, Memory Caching

Posted by Samer Abukhait on 12/15/03 04:24 PM

Is any body running AOL Server 4 on Redhat Enterprise Linux (Advanced Server)??

There is a big problem,, Cache management system gives server sessions without limits until it came out of memory completely.
The server cannot allocate memory for new sessions and crashes with:
unable to realloc XXXXX bytes

I am running Oracle 9i on the same redhat advanced server (on another box) and did not face this problem...
Oracle handles caching process in a correct way, but AOL does not.

I searched the net and all resources said that this message appears when the server runs out of memory.. I know!
The question is, why the caching forever? Where is the recycling concept?

2: Re: RH Enterprise Linux, Memory Caching (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Spencer on 12/16/03 08:37 PM

You may want to ask this at the AOLserver mailing list if you feel it's an AOLserver issue.

3: Re: RH Enterprise Linux, Memory Caching (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 12/23/03 03:03 PM

Samer opened bug 861153 on SourceForge about this. Tentative conclusion there is that this is probably due to the previously discussed massive memory leaks in certain versions of Oracle's OCI client libraries. If so, then this problem has nothing to do with OpenACS or AOLserver per-se, it is Oracle's bug. Best solution is to either patch or upgrade Oracle's client libraries, but if that's not feasible, it might also be possible to work around the issue by changing the AOLserver Oracle driver to use different OCI calls which may trigger fewer memory leaks.