OK, that kills the theory that the leak is triggered by subprocess exit. Another thing that would be worth trying is to just stop and start the postmaster a large number of times, to see if the leak occurs at postmaster exit.
It is not from the exit. I see the exact same problem and I never restart postgres and it never crashes. It runs constanty and with no crashes for 20-30 days until the box is out of memory and I have to reboot.
> R2: After having a look at the linux kernel mailing list, it seems that > this problem is not yet known there.
It is possible that it has already been fixed. I am seeing this memory leak quite clearly on 2.6.12.6, but there's no evidence of it at all on 2.6.16.27. The changelogs between those two versions show a lot of bugfixes for memory leaks. Also, that message from Will Glenn references a discussion where someone else running 2.6.12 was having a memory leak issue.
