I could have, but the system wasn’t set up to restart without downtime, and the server was also remote and not easily accessible.
It did acutally die due to a poweroutage some months later and took 2 days to get restarted.
So yeah sometimes restarting is way more undesirable than loosing access to 32GB of ram. I would have just eaten that cost otherwise until a more opportune chance to restart.
Besides, restarting to fix a problem is equivalent to giving up on understanding the issue, learning new stuff, and maybe finding a way better solution or preventing the type of error entirely.
I get not finding the motivation when your software is working against you and learning is ultimately fruitless like on windows, or not having the time in the moment to figure it out properly, but a perfectly good bug on a linux system when you have time is prime real-estate to grow your skills and find fulfillment.
There was a dedicated person on call, but it happened to be when they were away.
The Konsole was left running from a local access, with a while true loop of a service status command. When that service was stopped later, the while loop started rerunning the script every second, filling the buffer with error messages.
The tab was then killed remotely, but the Konsole window left running. Process ram usage went down but the file remained on tmpfs, which is not counted as ram usage so wasn’t noticed.
Then it took some time to notice the ram usage mismatch so noone thought of that konsole incident.
Could you have restarted to allow the OS to clean it up?
I could have, but the system wasn’t set up to restart without downtime, and the server was also remote and not easily accessible.
It did acutally die due to a poweroutage some months later and took 2 days to get restarted.
So yeah sometimes restarting is way more undesirable than loosing access to 32GB of ram. I would have just eaten that cost otherwise until a more opportune chance to restart.
Besides, restarting to fix a problem is equivalent to giving up on understanding the issue, learning new stuff, and maybe finding a way better solution or preventing the type of error entirely.
I get not finding the motivation when your software is working against you and learning is ultimately fruitless like on windows, or not having the time in the moment to figure it out properly, but a perfectly good bug on a linux system when you have time is prime real-estate to grow your skills and find fulfillment.
Ah that makes sense. I had considered it might be a server but you mentioned a Konsole tab so my mind decided it must have been local machine.
Crazy it took 2 days to restart the server!
There was a dedicated person on call, but it happened to be when they were away.
The Konsole was left running from a local access, with a while true loop of a service status command. When that service was stopped later, the while loop started rerunning the script every second, filling the buffer with error messages.
The tab was then killed remotely, but the Konsole window left running. Process ram usage went down but the file remained on tmpfs, which is not counted as ram usage so wasn’t noticed.
Then it took some time to notice the ram usage mismatch so noone thought of that konsole incident.