From 0fc51b569570e8bf5aecd5ee03a88eb668b7b385 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001

From: Anita Zhang <the.anitazha@gmail.com>

Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2021 16:33:10 -0700

Subject: [PATCH] fileio: start with 4k buffer for procfs

There's a very gradual increase of anonymous memory in systemd-journald that

blames to 2ac67221bb6270f0fbe7cbd0076653832cd49de2.

systemd-journald makes many calls to read /proc/PID/cmdline and

/proc/PID/status, both of which tend to be well under 4K. However the

combination of allocating 4M read buffers, then using `realloc()` to

shrink the buffer in `read_virtual_file()` appears to be creating

fragmentation in the heap (when combined with the other allocations

systemd-journald is doing).

To help mitigate this, try reading /proc with a 4K buffer as

`read_virtual_file()` did before 2ac67221bb6270f0fbe7cbd0076653832cd49de2.

If it isn't big enough then try again with the larger buffers.

---

 src/basic/fileio.c | 5 +++++

 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+)

diff --git a/src/basic/fileio.c b/src/basic/fileio.c

index 99a44fdea2..466c6321c7 100644

--- a/src/basic/fileio.c

+++ b/src/basic/fileio.c

@@ -431,6 +431,11 @@ int read_virtual_file(const char *filename, size_t max_size, char **ret_contents

                         }

                         n_retries--;

+                } else if (n_retries > 1) {

+                        /* Files in /proc are generally smaller than the page size so let's start with a page size

+                         * buffer from malloc and only use the max buffer on the final try. */

+                        size = MIN3(page_size() - 1, READ_VIRTUAL_BYTES_MAX, max_size);

+                        n_retries = 1;

                 } else {

                         size = MIN(READ_VIRTUAL_BYTES_MAX, max_size);

                         n_retries = 0;

-- 

2.31.1