Re: socket destroy delayed

Henner Eisen (eis@baty.hanse.de)
05 Aug 1998 00:06:30 +0200


Tom Vier <nester@sekurity.org> writes:

>
> what exactly does a socket destroy delayed mean? sometimes i get:
>
> Jul 25 22:14:02 zero kernel: Socket destroy delayed (r=212 w=0)
> in /var/log/messages.
>

It means that the kernel cannot free the internal data structures
associated with a released socket because there are still socket data
buffers (in the above case 212 bytes read memory) accounted to the
socket. For this reason, destroying is delayed and tried again later.
At some point, after the the remaining sk_buffs accounted to the socket
are freed, destroying should succeed.

> it keeps spitting that out about every 5 seconds or so. the only way to
> fix it is to reboot. it doesn't happen very often, but i'd like to find
> out what's causing it.

This might indicate a problem that some kernel entity (i.e protocol module or
network device driver), which is responsible for freeing an sk_buff, fails to
do so. To help tracking down the problem, try to find out under which
circumstances the messages start to appear (in particular, which program
closed a socket right before the messages appears, which network protocol
does it use, which network device drivers are involved).

Henner

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