505M RAM used by NetworkManager?!

guttersnipe · 06-13-2016, 06:52 PM

Hey Linux Hackers,

Can someone help me understand why NetworkManager is using 505M of RAM?

I'm running a simple RHEL7 web server on a small VPS with 256M RAM and a 1G swap file. My #1 most RAM-consuming process is NetworkManager.

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# ps aux | grep -i networkmanager
root       345  0.6 13.3 516673 32277 ?        Dsl  Jan11 1622:13 /usr/sbin/NetworkManager --no-daemon

More info:

Code:

[root@localhost ~]$ uname -a
Linux localhost 3.10.0-123.4.2.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Jun 30 16:09:14 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

TIA!

syg00 · 06-13-2016, 08:05 PM

Perhaps you should also get the header line.

guttersnipe · 06-14-2016, 12:07 PM

The box became unresponsive, so I had to reboot it.

Quote:

Perhaps you should also get the header line.

Sorry, here's the header too (after reboot)

Code:

[root@localhost ~]$ ps aux | head -n1
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
[root@localhost ~]$ ps aux | grep -i networkmanager
root       477  0.1  3.4 447909  8237 ?        Ssl  12:51   0:00 /usr/sbin/NetworkManager --no-daemon

So, after reboot, VSZ = vsize (in KiB) = (447909 KiB) / 1024 = 437 MiB.

And free

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            237          62          15           4         159         140
Swap:          1023           0        1023

^ That looks good. Of course, following the reboot, the box is running much smoother now, but--before the reboot--it was heavily swapping. I'm not worried about buffers/cache, but when the box was swapping and performance was horrible, NetworkManager was the process holding the most RAM on this machine.

Is this a known issue with NetworkManager on Cent7? This is a headless, CLI-only server with only 256M of RAM and no GUI. NetworkManager is now the default networking daemon for server installs of CentOS 7, and I'm just trying to understand why it's eating all my RAM. I didn't have this issue with Cent 6.

Emerson · 06-14-2016, 12:10 PM

NetworkManager is pretty pointless in a server, isn't it?

syg00 · 06-14-2016, 07:38 PM

The request for header was for your edification, not mine. Vsize is no indication of RAM usage - that is what RSS is included in the display for. Go get ps_mem for a (much) better indication of memory usage - may be in the repos, else just go download it, it's a python script.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emerson

NetworkManager is pretty pointless in a server, isn't it?

Probably - is systemd-networkd available in CentOS ?. I use that on my Arch Pi3 gateway/firewall.

Emerson · 06-15-2016, 06:26 AM

256 MB of RAM. It is asking for nice lean OS. Having Linux OS using less than 40 MB fully loaded is certainly possible ... perhaps not with RHEL.