Random Killings

November 11, 2009 | Posted by andrew

I’ve had an interesting problem since I started my mini-tournaments with validation on unseen data in that small runs completed OK but larger ones have either locked up the computer (unresponsive with the hard disk thrashing) or the process had been killed.

At first I suspected that my laptop had been hacked into and the hacker had killed my GP process because it was burning too much CPU and interfering with his spam mailing process. So I disconnected it from the internet and tried again but got the same results.

When I checked the /var/log/messages it turns out the process had been killed by ‘oom_killer’ which is a kernel process. It was killed for the simple reason that it had stolen all the system memory and was still demanding more i.e. it had a severe memory leak !

After doing some profiling with valgrind this turned out to be a missing free from the crossover function in my ast library. With this fixed, the runs continue.

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