vmware: nova compute memory grows continuously with creation and deletions on VMs

[Ishant Tyagi]

nova-compute memory grows to 3gb in a Scaled environment (5000 vm) where continuous VM operations were executed for 72 hours.

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
22181 nova 20 0 3325m 3.0g 6588 R 34.2 19.0 3984:23 nova-compute

To test the memory leak we created and deleted same number of vms for some iterations. Here is the data .

VM Count Memory (KB )
0 516528
20 518520
40 518520
60 522192
80 524068
100 526904
0 526904
20 526904
40 526904
60 526904
80 526904
100 529372
0 530972
20 530972
40 530972
60 530972
80 530972
100 533484
0 533484
20 533484
40 533484
60 533484
80 533484
100 535112
0 535112

When analysed with objgraph, it showed that suds library objects occupied most of the memory.