Re: Tor takes too much RAM

[Olaf Selke <olaf.selke@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Roger Dingledine wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 21, 2007 at 09:09:42AM +0200, Olaf Selke wrote:
>> on my Debian Etch box 'top' command shows
>>
>>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>> 15486 debian-t  25   0 2329m 1.5g  25m S   75 78.2  17930:45 tor
> 
> Yes, my directory authorities are using way too much ram too. It appears
> that we introduced something bad in 0.1.2.x that wasn't present in
> 0.1.1.x.
> 
> I'm tracking it down; do feel free to help :). Current progress is that
> I'm pretty sure it's not a memory leak -- something is actually using
> this memory.

today I noticed that according the FAQ tor needs 768 MB ram each 10 Mbps
bandwidth :-) Thus the amount of 2,3 MB virtual memory looks sensible
for 30 Mbps throughput. I wasn't aware of it. Since my box is equipped
with 2 GB ram only, throughput will neither be limited by cpu horsepower
nor by bandwidth to the internet. It's ram!

Supposed a connection makes an average of only 10 kbps, each connection
needs about incredible 768 kB ram! There might be some potential for
optimization.

Attached you'll find my memory stats. Blue graph displays free virtual
memory including swap space, green graph represents free real physical
memory. In week 25 tor crashed out of memory and has been restarted
manually. In week 27 tor started to eat up memory and died again with
out of memory mid of week 28.

regards, Olaf