[DRBD-user] DRBD 84 resyncer runs out of memory

freebird linbit at gelin.co.uk
Tue Feb 16 10:01:09 CET 2016

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


On Mon, 15 Feb 2016 17:04:55 +0000, freebird wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Feb 2016 15:29:39 +0100, Lars Ellenberg wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 04:10:14PM +0000, freebird wrote:
> > > Hi, I have a memory usage problem with the resync sender on a single
> > > resource.  If the total size of the out of sync blocks exceeds the
> > > memory size when drbd connects, the sync progresses until it exhausts
> > > the memory leading to the OOM killer kicking in (too slowly to make
> > > any difference) followed by a kernel panic.  Everything else including
> > > replication of very large files that exceed the memory size, works
> > > fine.
> > > 
> > > I've tested with out of sync sizes up to just short of the total
> > > memory when the resync succeeds and observed that the memory used
> > > increases in line with sync'ed blocks i.e. the resync process seems to
> > > be allocating memory per block and doesn't release or reuse it ...
> > > only when the resync completes does the memory get released.  The
> > > strange thing is that I can't find which specific process is retaining
> > > the memory ... nothing shows up in top, slabtop or the process table.
> > 
> > We regularly resync terrabytes of dummy data in test VMs that have
> > only a few hundred megs of ram allocated. So I seriously doubt
> > that this was a generic DRBD issue, but would suggest that
> > something is off in your deployment.
> > 
> Hi Lars, that's what I suspected myself as I know the DRBD user base is large and googling didn't find anyone else with the issue but I was just hoping for some suggestions.  Anyway, it turns out to be an XFS issue ... if I dismount the filesystem before the resync, the problem doesn't occur.  The XFS setup hasn't been tweaked from what mkfs.xfs defaults created so I'll investigate tuning or even using a different filesystem.  Thanks for the reply, Nige.
> 
Hi Lars, ignore comments about XFS.  It was a duff test and it makes no difference whether a filesystem is mounted or not (you just can't get the staff these days:).  Will try DRBD 83 on current build and also 84 on a kernel v3 distro.  Nige.

-- 
Unix never says 'please'. [Rob Pike]



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