[chef] Debugging memory leak issues with chef-client?

[Brad Knowles < >]

Folks,

I've seen CHEF-3432 and CHEF-3985, but I'm still seeing memory leak issues 
with chef-client 10.18.2, even though it's not running in daemon mode.  The 
VM is configured for 2GB of "RAM" and 8GB of swap, and I'm now seeing 
chef-client reliably running up to ~9GB VSZ and 1.7GB RSS.  This just started 
today, as I've been debugging and resolving various other issues in the 
cookbooks and recipes that we're using for this system.

However, it's not exactly clear to me what the best debugging process is, to 
try and figure out why it's leaking memory.  I did check the node with a 
"knife node show -l", and the output is about 3400 lines long, comprising 
some 113KB of data.  That's a little bigger than usual, but it doesn't seem 
to be totally out of whack.

And no, we're not using search at all.  I wish we were, but that's a 
different story for a different day.


Are there particular tools or command-line options I should be using to try 
and figure out why chef-client is growing without bounds?

--
Brad Knowles 
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