Re: Postmaster uses Large Amounts of Swap

Tiger Technologies <lists(at)tigertech(dot)com> writes:
> Today I noticed that the swap used on my system was > 120M, and it seems
> to be coming from the postmaster:
> USER %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS STAT START TIME COMMAND
> postgres 0.0 0.0 1668 0 SW 2000 0:00 [pg_ctl]
> postgres 0.1 1.1 135840 1528 S 2000 134:56 /usr/bin/postmaster -i

> That's not normal, is it?
> It's been running for 73 days, with fairly light load:

Do you use password authentication?

We just recently noticed that the postmaster leaks a few dozen bytes of
memory when processing a password auth request. Attached is a patch
against 7.0.*.

regards, tom lane

*** src/backend/libpq/crypt.c.orig Sat Jul 17 16:17:01 1999
--- src/backend/libpq/crypt.c Wed Feb 7 18:40:01 2001
***************
*** 59,64 ****
--- 59,65 ----
bufsize = strlen(pwdfilename) + strlen(CRYPT_PWD_RELOAD_SUFX) + 1;
rpfnam = (char *) palloc(bufsize);
snprintf(rpfnam, bufsize, "%s%s", pwdfilename, CRYPT_PWD_RELOAD_SUFX);
+ pfree(pwdfilename);

return rpfnam;
}
***************
*** 79,84 ****
--- 80,87 ----
pwdfile = AllocateFile(filename, "rb");
#endif

+ pfree(filename);
+
return pwdfile;
}

***************
*** 131,136 ****
--- 134,140 ----

filename = crypt_getpwdreloadfilename();
result = unlink(filename);
+ pfree(filename);

/*
* We want to delete the flag file before reading the contents of the