brackup possible memory leak - consumes 1.5GB+ with 64MB chunk size

[George Hills]

Hi,

I've been looking at a server which backs up about 600GB of data
overnight from a local disk to Amazon using brackup 1.09.

The backup process has worked faultlessly for several weeks, but
recently begain failing.

The pattern to the failures is that brackup consumes all the available
RAM and then gets killed. The available RAM on the box is upwards of 2GB.

The data on the local disk changes quite a lot. brackup does not always
run out of memory at the same time. Sometimes it seems to run for a long
period and complete a substantial amount of the upload, while RAM use
remains stable around 400MB, before blowing up.

The box is:

2.6.24-19-xen #1 SMP Wed Jun 18 17:11:09 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

Ubuntu Hardy

We have keep_backups=7 and chunk_size = 5m.

It previously had some older version of Net::Amazon::S3, but I've
upgraded it to the most recent from CPAN to see if it would fix the
problem and it didn't make any difference.

Would be grateful for any advice.

Cheers.

-- 
George Hills
Systems Administrator
Brightbox
http://www.brightbox.co.uk/