On Tue, Nov 01, 2011 at 11:57:57AM -0400, Mark London wrote: > Hi - On RHEL 6, with the latest updates, I have SASLAUTHD configured > to use PAM authentication. I'm also running SSSD. U sing this > configuration, the SASLAUTHD processes would gradually increase > memory usage. After running for several days, each process was > using up about 680M. Are there any known memory leaks when using > PAM? I've found posts on the web from people complaining about PAM > memory leaks, but am not sure they still exists. In any event, I'm > also experiencing that about once a week, SASLAUTHD starts recording > time out errors when trying to contact SSSD, i.e. > "pam_sss(imap:auth): Request to sssd failed. Timer expired." I > decided to enable SASLAUTHD caching with the -c flag, and was > surprised to discover that the SASLAUTHD processes no longer use up > significant memory (i.e. they are now using < 10M)! Can anyone > explain this behavior? Thanks. - Mark > Each trip through the PAM stack loses some memory. When you turn on caching, you make a single trip for each authentication via SASL and then it uses the cached copy from then on. This bounds your memory use to N x num-users. Without caching, the growth as you found is unbounded. Regards, Ken
