Hi all,

I have tracked a massive memory leak down to the blog module installed on my site.

Currently I have 2 blogs, each with about 40 articles each., and a couple of widgets enabled. This is on SS version 2.3.3 and running on apache 2 on an ubuntu server (9.04).

Currently I have had to increase the PHP memory allocation to 550m to make the module work, but this makes the whole site unstable.

Running a debug_memory=1 results in showing the script uses about 530mb.

I also ran a debug_profile and this was the result:

Calls                    Time  Routine
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 20    6909.1868 ms (96.09 %)  template(Comments)
  1    80.2820 ms (1.12 %)  template(CommentLink)
  1    51.4619 ms (0.72 %)  all_execution
  2    16.5398 ms (0.23 %)  template(ChildrenOf)
  9    13.3250 ms (0.19 %)  SSViewer::process
  7    10.0341 ms (0.14 %)  template(BlogEntries)
  4    9.3930 ms (0.13 %)  template(Page)
  1    9.1622 ms (0.13 %)  template(Dates)
208    8.9576 ms (0.12 %)  casting cost
  1    8.1940 ms (0.11 %)  template(Widgets)
 11    6.4194 ms (0.09 %)  template(TagsCollection)
  9    5.5771 ms (0.08 %)  Requirements::includeInHTML
 62    4.3554 ms (0.06 %)  template(Date)
  1    4.1640 ms (0.06 %)  template(Level)
 82    4.0302 ms (0.06 %)  template(Link)
 13    3.3603 ms (0.05 %)  template(Content)
 10    3.2499 ms (0.05 %)  template(Author)
  1    2.8329 ms (0.04 %)  DB::connect
  1    2.6040 ms (0.04 %)  template(Silverstripenavigator)
 13    2.3267 ms (0.03 %)  template(Title)
  1    2.0969 ms (0.03 %)  template(SideBar)
  1    1.9188 ms (0.03 %)  template(MetaTags)
 26    1.5690 ms (0.02 %)  template(Format)
 26    1.4520 ms (0.02 %)  template(Year)
  8    1.2369 ms (0.02 %)  template(LinkingMode)
 14    1.1995 ms (0.02 %)  template(MenuTitle)
 10    0.8717 ms (0.01 %)  template(ParagraphSummary)
  5    0.8280 ms (0.01 %)  template(Tag)
 20    0.8166 ms (0.01 %)  template(Count)
 10    0.7300 ms (0.01 %)  template(Long)
 10    0.5882 ms (0.01 %)  template(XML)
  3    0.4902 ms (0.01 %)  template(WidgetHolder)
  1    0.4530 ms (0.01 %)  template(PaginationSummary)
  1    0.4470 ms (0.01 %)  main.php init
  7    0.2768 ms (0.00 %)  template(PageNum)
  4    0.2632 ms (0.00 %)  template(LevelOneLinkTop)
  4    0.2582 ms (0.00 %)  template(LevelOneLinkBot)
  1    0.1900 ms (0.00 %)  template(CommentText)
  2    0.1740 ms (0.00 %)  template(MetaKeywords)
  4    0.1721 ms (0.00 %)  template(CurrentBool)
  1    0.1609 ms (0.00 %)  template(RSSLink)
  2    0.1590 ms (0.00 %)  template(MetaDescription)
  4    0.1538 ms (0.00 %)  template(Pos)
  1    0.1531 ms (0.00 %)  template(PostLink)
  1    0.0868 ms (0.00 %)  template(NextLink)
  1    0.0811 ms (0.00 %)  template(DisplayMode)
  1    0.0789 ms (0.00 %)  template(ShowSecondLevel)
  1    0.0739 ms (0.00 %)  template(URLSegment)
  2    0.0558 ms (0.00 %)  template(Last)
  1    0.0558 ms (0.00 %)  template(MoreThanOnePage)
  1    0.0479 ms (0.00 %)  template(NotLastPage)
  1    0.0379 ms (0.00 %)  template(NotFirstPage)
  1    0.0179 ms (0.00 %)  unprofiled
  1    0.0172 ms (0.00 %)  template(Layout)

       17.9756 ms (0.25 %)  Missed
============================================================================
       7190.6440 ms (100.00 %)  OVERALL TIME
============================================================================

If anyone can shed some light on this, I would be eternally grateful!!

Mo

On closer inspection, it looks like the first line:

20 6909.1868 ms (96.09 %) template(Comments) 

Looking closer at the site, from this, it looks like there is a shit load of comment spam. I thought commenting had been disabled, apparently not! Now I have 130000 comments sitting in the database!

Joy!!

Yikes! I thought the 4350 spam comments I had yesterday was bad, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to you. My page was only up for a couple of hours; I guess this shows just how efficient the bots are.

Tell me about it!!

The comment form was only on the blog, and the site was only up for a month or so. It just amazes me how quickly they found it and spammed it!

That will teach me for a lack of vigilance :s.

Hey Mo

Did you create a bug-ticket for that one? Seems to be pretty bad application design if thousands of comments are being loaded into memory just to display a page (where the comments aren't even shown)?

I think it is because it summarizes how many comments are associated with each story that is displayed. So to me it kind of makes sense.

I suppose it is worth flagging, it would be nice if spam didn't bring down a website like that :)

It doesn't make sense to me. To count the comments that have been made per page can be done easily on the DB level. A DB query won't use that much ram for that amount of records (in DB terms, 130000 isn't too much of a deal) . If all these records are being loaded into DataObjects and merged in a DataObjectSet, just to count the number of comments, then it's clearly an application design flaw. Or maybe I didn't understand what you mean with "summarize". Even if it does display some summary, it would be foolish to not use at least a LIMIT on the DB query.

Actually, you have a point. I thought I might have customised the display a bit, but it is pretty much default, so I would have prefered it to be a bit more stable :s.

I will submit a bug report now! :)