Django memory usage going up with every request

Ludwik Trammer picture Ludwik Trammer · Feb 19, 2010 · Viewed 14.1k times · Source

I moved my first Django project from DjangoEurope to Webfaction, and that started an issue looking like a memory leak. With every single request memory usage of the server process goes up about 500kb. It never goes down. This goes on until Webfaction kills it for using too much memory.

I can clearly see this when I refresh the Django's admin interface in my browser (although this happens with every single page, not only with admin interface - I though admin interface would be a nice test case, because there is no my code directly there). With every browser reload the memory usage goes up couple hundreds kilobytes.

I test the memory using a command suggested by Webfaction:

ps -u publica -o rss,etime,pid,command

More about my setup:

  • Django 1.1 (stable)
  • Default Webfaction Django setup using Apache and mod_wsgi
  • DEBUG set to False
  • MySQLdb 1.2.2 from Webfaction, but after hearing it had some problems I tried version 1.2.3c. Didn't help.

Edit: I created an empty Django project - default Django configuration plus django.contrib.admin and fresh empty database (tried both with mysql and postgresql). I started reloading Django admin in my browser and watched memory usage. At first I saw the problem occurring - memory usage grew after every reload. But then it stabilized and stopped growing. That's consistant with how my original project behaved on Django Europe. Unfortunately on Webfaction it never seems to stabilize (or at least not within limits of memory available to my account). Any advice?

Answer

Ludwik Trammer picture Ludwik Trammer · Feb 28, 2010

I'm afraid I haven't got any definite answers. Graham Dumpleton's tips were most helpfull, but unfortunately he didn't make an answer (just comments), so there is no way to accept his response.

Although I still haven't fully resolved the issue, here are some basic tips for other people having similar problems: