Node memory filling up on unused node

AllStarLink
1

The node is a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Plus Rev 1.3, using a Masters Communications RL-20. We have literally built a dozen of these.

When I tried to call the node with RepeaterPhone yesterday, it would not answer. When I checked the computer link this morning it was hung up with most all available memory used. It was necessary to power down and restart to gain access. When the appliance came back, it updated software with 76 packages. Then the machine started using 310/910 MiB.

Several hours later, the memory was filling up using 740/910 MiB. A simple reset caused memory use to reset to 310/910 MiB.

Filling memory, causing the machine to lockup has happened 3 times before that I have noticed. The node is built for one of our repeaters, but is running on the desk in the shack right now. I would like to resolve the hang up before I trek to a remote repeater.

Has anyone encountered a similar issue? Is the Pi ‘too long in the tooth’? Is there a process running that is filling temp memory and not clearing? I appreciate your insights.

2

I haven’t experienced this, and I have a few different generations of Pi running asterisk.

Did you check a utility like “htop” to see what process(s) were using so much memory? You can sort by memory in htop.

Also, if you are not using allmon3 and/or cockpit, consider disabling them. Can’t hurt.

–E
de W6EL

3

As @w6el asked, do you have a browser that is always watching the Cockpit web admin portal? If so, there's a known memory leak in that software and, over time, the memory usage will be significant.

4

Yes, I do have the Brave browser looking at the portal. I will disconnect. Thank you so much!

5

Here's a link to the Cockpit memory issue :

[cockpit/python]-bridge memory usage/leak (systemd pkg?)

6

WA3WCO,

Thank you for the link. After reading it, that is precisely the problem. It looks like logging out regularly is the interim fix. I appreciate your heads-up.

7

FWIW on a recent Pi Zero 2W, I was unable to use cockpit. The system would run out of memory completely and sometimes even reboot when I tried using it. I found that I could use cockpit if I shut off several other services. This Pi only has 1G of ram, so some things like this are kind of expected I suppose.

I also went into the apache2 config files and lowered the idle thread count to just 2 threads.

Fortunately asterisks works great so I have no legitimate issues.