Massive memory footprint from rtmpdump

[Nick]

On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 15:20:12 +0000
Jimmy Aitken <jimmy.aitken at gmail.com> wrote:

> Environment: Mac 8 i7core, Mountain Lion.
> 
> I was running a pvr in the background today, when I noticed the
> system was getting sluggish and some spinning pinwheels starting to
> appear.  I fired up Activity Monitor and rtmpdump had grabbed 12G of
> virtual memory and increasing.  I killed it at the point it was 18G
> in size, at which time the Mac began to respond again.
> 

I've also had rtmpdump get confused and start eating huge wads of RAM.
I'm on Linux, Slackware 14.0 64bit, on an i5. I noticed sluggishness,
figured it was the machine swapping (something I'd not seen on this
machine, what with 8G of RAM), and found rtmpdump using 7.lots and
growing.

My copy of rtmpdump was built from a git export from November last
year, because I haven't had regular problems I hadn't worrying about
keeping up to date. I guess I'd better update it, and if you are
rocking an old version of rtmpdump then that'd be where to start.

> 
> Does anyone have any thought as to why this may have started?  I'm now
> reticent to leave any jobs running automatically via cron in case this
> starts up again, and my machine in unusable when I get back to it.

Isn't that what ulimits are for? Limiting the memory usage by a
process? Ah, that seems to be for file sizes. I'm sure there is a way to
limit memory so you can set-up a safety net (at least another script
monitoring rtmpdump's memory usage and killing it if it gets too big).

Nick