> Tonight I am going to upgrade postgres on the first machine and see if > it makes any difference, but it'll be about a week before I know for > sure if memory is still being lost (it's such a slow leak that you > cannot tell with just a couple days). I use the latest 8.1.4 postgres software on my machine, this does not help.
Actually, I was going to upgrade to 7.4.13 thinking that maybe some bugfix got into the 7.4 series that didn't make it into the 8.1 series. That said, however, I think this is a long shot and I'm not really expecting it to help. All my research a few months ago pointed to this being a memory leak in the 2.6.12 kernel, and I've been patiently waiting for a good time to upgrade the kernel, cross my fingers, and hope everything is magically fixed. But since it came up on the mod_perl list recently and I saw that others with very similar configurations were having the same problems, it's renewed my interest in trying to pinpoint the problem.
You say that you are using Linux 2.6.12.6 on the machine with the problem and Linux 2.6.16.27 on the one where you do not loose memory. Are there any other differences (RAID, Reiser FS, DBI, DBD::Pg, Embperl, physical memory or swap
As far as software goes, they are identical with the exception of the kernel version and postgres version. Both run reiserfs. No RAID. The physical memory is the same (2GB). The differences are: Leaky machine: 256MB swap, P4 2.8GHz Non-leaky machine: 512MB swap, Pentium D (dual core) 3.0GHz. What is your kernel version?
