[Click] Fwd: About memory allocation

[Beyers Cronje]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Guido Alejandro Gavilanes <ggavilanes at gmail.com>
Date: Nov 15, 2006 10:41 AM
Subject: Re: [Click] About memory allocation
To: Beyers Cronje <bcronje at gmail.com>

Hello!
I did another test, and this time it was a simpler without etherswitch
in the configuration, I left the system testing and in a matter of 5
hours, all memory was consumed, my click was stopped by a program I
did to monitor meminfo, and avoiding having to reboot the machine
after crashing due to a lack of memory.
I would like to know if a cumulative problem like this has happened
before with memory resources, or with kernel distribution-clickversion
I am using.
Thank you! (I attached here my previous message with the first tests
done with the latest CVS version).

Guido

On 11/14/06, Guido Alejandro Gavilanes <ggavilanes at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Beyers,
>
> I did it as yoy suggested me, but the results are the same, it runs
> out of memory in 3 seconds with the etherswitch and it lowers at
> 2KBytes/s of RAM without etherswitch. I was wondering if a previous
> version of click would be better in this sense... but not sure yet.
> I got again my console dead with all these messages:
>
>  __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0xf0/0)
>  __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0xf0/0)
>  __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0xf0/0)
> ...
> and checking my /var/log/messages I see also lots of these:
>
>  __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x20/0)
> .
> .
> .
> what else it could be?
>
> Thanks again,
>
> Guido

On 11/14/06, Beyers Cronje <bcronje at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Guido,
>
> As a start I would recommend you upgrade to CVS version of Click. Some
> memory problem fixes is in CVS that's not in 1.5.0, the main one that
> springs to mind is the skb Recycling bug fix. Let us know how it goes.
>
> Cheers
>
> Beyers Cronje
>
>
> On 11/14/06, Guido Alejandro Gavilanes <ggavilanes at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hello Eddie and all developers which make this project a very useful
> > tool for research!!
> >
> > I have been working on a switch prototype using click (1.5.0) using
> > ethernet encapsulation and forwarding between 2 interfaces on a host.
> > Trying with some ellaborated configurations (after having tried a bit
> > with click elements functionality), I began to perform some gross
> > testing with certain amount of packets per second, and then some
> > problem started to appear...
> >
> > - I am using 6000 packets/sec on one interface and going out from the
> > second interface. Packets are pings and are generated by a tester
> > machine with two NICs. Those pings generate a throughput of 18Mbps
> > according to my tester. This traffic is unidirectional and just
> > forwarded by my click device.
> >
> > - internally I use an Etherswitch to enable the host to perform
> > learning and use some other interfaces later. It is running on Kernel
> > mode and not running anything else or elements different from the
> > distribution.
> >
> > - in this test, The host running the click configuration runs out of
> > memory in a matter of few seconds, more or less it looses 3Mbytes of
> > memory per second (I tested this using command cat /proc/meminfo  ->
> > MemFree  information). In the console, it appears this message
> >
> > " __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x...)",
> >
> > then it starts killing processes and finally crashes, having to
> > reboot, or putting a script to monitor memory and shutting down click
> > when a limit is reached. I have seen on linux pages this is certainly
> > a memory problem, but anyway after unloading click module, memory is
> > not freed.
> >
> > - When I replaced the etherswitch element with another void internally
> > hard-connected element (due to the fact etherswitch is experimental),
> > it also looses memory at a lower rate, (more or less 3KBytes/sec) with
> > the same packet rate described above. (I tested it for 1000 seconds
> > and noted the continuously decreasing memory)
> >
> > - The same occurs by just replacing this configuration by a simpler
> > one, just receiving from an eth interface and putting through an
> > output queue to the other interface.
> >
> > - I searched in the mailing lists, but I dont see "memory leaks"
> > problems (in fact just one
> >
> https://amsterdam.lcs.mit.edu/pipermail/click/2006-June/005022.html
> ),
> > and that's why I guess my problem may require your attention.
> >
> > -> The host machine I am using is a pentium 3, @800 MHz, 128MBytes in
> > RAM, Swap  256.
> > -> Operating System: Red Hat 9.0, running a kernel downloaded from
> > www.kernel.org ( version 2.4.32) and patched accordingly to click
> > instructions.
> >
> > Ok, this is the problem, I would like to read some ideas around it,
> > and Thank you in advance for any additional information!
> >
> > Guido
> > _______________________________________________
> > click mailing list
> > click at amsterdam.lcs.mit.edu
> > https://amsterdam.lcs.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/click
> >
>
>


--
GUIDO ALEJANDRO GAVILANES CASTILLO
Electronics and Telecommunication Engineer
Universidad del Cauca - Colombia
Master in optical Communications and Photonic Technologies
Politecnico di Torino - Italy
Cell: +39 3405269579
Via Sassari 18 Torino, Italy