Shibboleth Developers

[André Cruz <>]

On 2008/01/02, at 14:29, Scott Cantor wrote:

> > I know I've visited this subject numerous times but this time I've
> > gathered some data. I let the shibd daemon run for a week under
> > valgrind's Massif and this is the results:
>
> I'm afraid I don't know what any of that tells me. 1.3 is not where  
> the
> testing effort should be spent. This is even more true if you're  
> telling me
> that there's an RPC problem. That code is gone in 2.0, so this is not
> relevant.

I know shiny new toys (2.0) are more motivating than old stuff (1.3)  
but, as far as I know, 1.3 is the ONLY stable version of the  
shibboleth SP released so please bear with me...


> > From what I can see 99% of the growing memory usage I see in Linux
> > comes from SharChild::svc_create().
>
> I have a hard time believing that, it's just a wrapper around a  
> couple of
> Sun RPC calls to wrap the sockets. Perhaps the problem is too much  
> socket
> creation, which is going to be much worse with a prefork Apache. Has  
> anybody
> produced these results with an Apache that isn't creating so many  
> processes?

I can see that svc_create() is called when a thread is started. In  
this function a bunch of functions that allocate memory are called  
(svcfd_create() for example). If a problem happens when svc_register()  
is called some cleanup code is called: svc_destroy() or the inline  
version. But I don't see this kind of code being called when the  
thread finishes... When the while cycle finishes on run(), shouldn't  
there be the same cleanup code? I must be missing something here. If  
this code is really missing then that would explain the memory growth.

Regards,
André