[imp] process / memory problems in new release (?)

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Matthew Dunham <matthew.dunham at ic.ucsb.edu>:

>>>>> I've confirmed that these problems don't exist in Horde 3.2.1/IMP 4.2,
>>>>> so the trigger is clearly something that's been introduced in the past
>>>>> months' development efforts. Just for fun I disabled caching,  
>>>>> thinking this new feature might be the culprit -- but no dice.
>>>>
>>>> Which caching feature did you disable? There are a number of  
>>>> different ones; several are called out in the accompanying  
>>>> comments as ones that increase session size, which might lead to  
>>>> memory growth in httpd processes.
>>>
>>> ah, the new horde object caching system (if that's what you call it).
>>>
>>> $conf['cache']['driver'] = 'file';
>>>
>>> i'm using this setting in production, but see the same behavior with:
>>>
>>> $conf['cache']['driver'] = 'none';
>>
>> That will definitely not hurt you and may hurt. You should look  
>> through the IMP settings for things that might increase session  
>> size - I don't have them in front of me right now, sorry.
>
> So I'm not sure what this first sentence means.
>
> My tests seem to indicate that setting this cache driver to 'none'  
> doesn't change the symptom -- process size increases with either of  
> these settings.
>
> I would assume that file-based cache is storing objects in the  
> filesystem rather than memory. Is this not correct?
>
> Also, when you suggest IMP settings may increase session size, do  
> you suggest the session object is being cached in memory regardless  
> of the cache driver setting?

What this means is that caching is not your problem.  And session size  
shouldn't be either - there was definitely nothing added to increase  
session size (at least in IMP) between 4.2 and 4.3 and if anything,  
session size would have been reduced.  Your problem lies elsewhere.   
FWIW, in the past I know there have been problems with Solaris/IMP  
with - at a minimum - database related stuff and the spellchecker.

Another thing you might want to look at is your PHP optimizer/cacher.   
Seeing a process' resident memory jump 17MB on the first access sounds  
suspiciously like that PHP/Apache combo is caching the opcodes for  
that process only and is not using shared memory for this cache.  if  
every process is caching its own opcodes - that is very no bueno.

michael

-- 
___________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at horde.org]