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I wrote a parser to read the auth.log. For some reason while parsing auth.log I get that VSZ is larger than the total physical memory, which is 2GB. Depending on the size of auth.log and how long reader has been running, VSZ will increase (sometimes up to ~8GB).
How normal is it? What could be the reason of this memory consumption?
# ps aux
USER PID CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 17547 0.7 1.4 3123744 30820 pts/2 Sl+ Jul30 11:42 ./reader auth.log
# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2063568 1842232 221336 0 179084 1057680
-/+ buffers/cache: 605468 1458100
Swap: 4032504 288 4032216
Mike Darrow
Posted 2013-08-01T04:07:17.403
Reputation: 3
Without seeing the script, the most likely reason is you are reading the entire log into memory, or you have a memory leak through not releasing resources. Would you like to add the script to the post? – Paul – 2013-08-01T04:27:51.877
@Paul: Is that were true, why would his resident set size be so low? – David Schwartz – 2013-08-01T04:32:29.390
@Paul: Thanks. Yes, I'm reading almost the entire log into memory. I'm not able to post it due to my job. – Mike Darrow – 2013-08-01T12:50:53.647