Tor takes too much RAM

[Ben Wilhelm]

Scott Bennett wrote:
>      Does LINUX have vmstat(8)?  Or swapinfo(8)/pstat(8)?  In any case,
> it must have ps(1), which should give some sort of breakdown of what tor
> is using.

It does have vmstat. I should point out, however, that vmstat shows 
pretty much the exact same stuff that free does, only with less math 
done for you, a few important missing numbers, and a few added numbers 
which aren't really important in this case.

(This is a different server, which is why it has more RAM)
$ vmstat && free
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- 
----cpu----
  r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy 
id wa
  0  0   2716  27472 143508  20876    1    1     1     3    3    3  3 12 
77  7
              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        385840     358368      27472          0     143508      20876
-/+ buffers/cache:     193984     191856
Swap:       369452       2716     366736

Tor is currently disabled on that first server because I run other 
things on it that I'd rather stayed functioning :) My relatively small 
90mb usage is pretty meaningless compared to the 1.5gb usage of others, 
though, and on my other computer it's using 136m RES according to top.

   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
24579 zorba     15   0  148m 136m 4724 S  5.3 36.3 278:10.78 tor

>      So how was your system affected?  Was there heavy paging going on?
> Or worse, swapping?  Those are what one would expect when there is a lot
> of contention for the available page frames.

It's not a local system, so I didn't have an easy way of seeing a hard 
drive indicator. I can tell you that I was having literally 
thirty-second-long delays just trying to use the command line, which 
went away when I killed tor. So I suspect it was swapping like a mofo.

Version 0.1.2.14 - I'm just updating with Debian (unstable, I suspect.)

-Ben