SUMMARY: nscd memory usage

Hi,

there were two responses. It is a bug in ncsd, for Solaris 8 the only
solution for now is restarting nscd every now and then until a patch is
available.

Jan-Olaf Droese: same situation on some Solaris 2.6 boxes. Only stoping
and restarting nscd helps.

Joel Minsky (Sun): suggested to run nscd -g. I did this a day after
restarting nscd and there were 25000 entries in the hosts cache (the box
is a very busy web server), looked on sunsolve and found Bugs 4344735 and
4159699). Joels answer:

Bingo, bug 4344735 is a duplicate of 4159699. There are patches for 2.6
and 7, I don't see one for Sol 8 but the fix is supposedly integrated
into update 4, which I think is the 7/01 release. This looks like what
you're seeing, nscd isn't flushing old entries, but instead creates a
huge database. From bug 4159699:
...
So restart nscd every once in a while, or get update 4, or open a call
with sun to try and ask for a patch. 

original question was:

> lately a box running Solaris 8 got slower and started paging with high io 
> rates, uptime was 110 days. The reason was the process nscd getting quite
> big. top showed nscd consuming 150MB RES out of the 512MB memory 
> installed, so naturally there wasn't enough memory for other things. We
> did not change /etc/nscd.conf, the box acts mainly as a loaded http and
> mail server. After stopping and starting nscd everything was ok again. Are
> there (still) problems with nscd?

Thanks all,
Michael

-- 
Michael Hase                   Six Offene Systeme GmbH
michael@six.de                 Sielminger Str. 63
http://www.six.de              70771 Leinfelden-Echterdingen
phone +49 711 99091 62         Germany