mod_perl memory leak

Question

Hello, I recently discovered that one of our sites has a memory leak in it, it's very strange because it happened all of the sudden. I've used GTop to measure the memory size per process and it tells me that the real value is somewhere around 65 MB (on the server) per request and and additional 5 MB shared.

I tried preloading the modules in the startup.pl file a indicated in the performance tuning article for mod_perl. Nothing happened if fact the shared memory decreased down to 3.7 MB, in this situation I thought that my application is leaking memory do before any line of code got executed I measured the memory just to find out that the total value is in fact 64 MB, my questions are: Is there a default preallocation of memory for each process? Is there a configuration issue? Is mod_perl leaking memory ?

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

This is probably a question that's better asked on the mod_perl mailing list. There are too many variables (versions of perl/mod_perl/apache, what modules you're loading, what OS you're running, what MPM, apache configuration, etc) involved here to really help in a Q/A forum like this, since there is not "right" answer.