Fun With Memory Leaks

Sunday, January 01, 2006, at 10:08AM

By Eric Richardson

I mentioned recently that eThreads has memory leaks and that those leaks combined with a comment spam attack led to the system crashing while I was in South Carolina. I said at the time that the leak was "not big." Well, I think I have to retract that statement:

1: mem size: 20099072      change: 20099072
2: mem size: 20369408      change: 270336
3: mem size: 20635648      change: 266240
4: mem size: 20877312      change: 241664
5: mem size: 21114880      change: 237568
...

And the spam attacks haven't let up at all. It's only 3pm and so far today I've seen 8,033 comment spam attempts and 25,125 total page requests. Seeing as this blog really only averages maybe 115 or so pages a day right now (sorry for ignoring you lately), I tend to think those aren't human hits.

I'm blocking the spammers using lookups on the domains in the comments, but eThreads still runs most of the way through before processing that phase, so the damage gets done memory-wise (though not comment spam-wise, which is still a huge improvement). Tailing my access log for this blog roughly 1 in 3 accesses are comment spam. That's pretty crazy.

All this adds up to today being memory leak killing day.