Tor takes too much RAM

[Ben Wilhelm]

Here's some docs for you to look over, since you clearly don't know the 
free command.

http://swoolley.org/man.cgi/1/free
http://rimuhosting.com/howto/memory.jsp (look at "interpreting free".)

Also, running it on a system and comparing the output to /proc/meminfo 
can be enlightening. I find it gives a good overview of what the system 
is doing - "top" might say "hey this program is using a lot of memory", 
but "free" can tell you "this entire system is struggling" on the 
commandline, which is occasionally much nicer than opening up top. I 
would have included top output except that I didn't think of posting to 
the list before doing this, and I suspect that starting tor cleanly 
would not have demonstrated the memory usage as well.

Essentially, it's telling me that before I killed tor, I had 7m of 
swapfile and 1.7m of RAM free. Deducting buffers and cache, I had a 
whopping 10mb of RAM free. After I killed tor, that changed to 43mb of 
swap and 57mb of main memory free, with 11m used by buffers and cache. 
Note that the former was after I'd killed apache and mysql in an attempt 
to have a usable command-line - I imagine it would have looked worse if 
I hadn't already done that.

So, essentially, tor was eating 90mb or so of RAM at that point. 
Considering Olaf's hilarious 1.5gb example, I guess I was getting off 
lightly.

-Ben

Scott Bennett wrote:
>      On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 23:39:45 -0700 Ben Wilhelm <zorba-tor at pavlovian.net>
> wrote:
> 
>> # free
>>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
>> Mem:         98520      96772       1748          0       2220       5848
>> -/+ buffers/cache:      88704       9816
>> Swap:        65528      58480       7048
>> # killall tor
>> # free
>>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
>> Mem:         98520      41464      57056          0        644      10356
>> -/+ buffers/cache:      30464      68056
>> Swap:        65528      22496      43032
>>
>> I'd love to keep it running, but when it's singlehandedly chewing up 
>> more than half of my system's RAM, it just isn't going to happen. Any 
>> suggestions on this? Are there config options I can tweak to make it a 
>> little less RAM-hungry, or is it just intrinsically a memory gobbler?
>>
>      How can you tell that it is?  The display of numbers above doesn't seem to
> show the important figure, namely, the working set size for tor.  The rest of
> what tor allocates in user space is irrelevant.  Kernel space allocations that
> are page-fixed (in slang, "wired [down]") are important, but those that are not
> fixed shouldn't usually matter either.  What, for example, does the "used"
> column above mean?  Is that the total virtual memory allocated to a particular
> process?  To all processes?  Or is it just the page frame memory currently in
> use by a particular process?  By all processes?  Even top(1) gives more useful
> information than your "free" command.
> 
> 
>                                   Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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