Re: zenmap crashing and leaking memory

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 04:37:41AM +0000, Brandon Enright wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:55:48 -0400 or thereabouts "Jason Mantor"
> <jmantor () gmail com> wrote:
> >      I've been having some problem with zenmap on Windows XP.  I'm
> > trying to scan a large but sparse LAN.  There are about 1000 machines
> > spread across network with an 18 bit mask. I've not been able to
> > complete a scan since zenmap was released.  All of the releases
> > including the latest (4.76) crash on me before the scan completes.
> > The zenmap windows goes blank (solid white) and when I look in task
> > manager the memory it is using just keeps increasing and it consumes a
> > constant 50 % of the CPU.  I'm using XP Professional with SP3.
>
> Hi Jason.  I've tried importing a large scan (via XML) into Zenmap and
> it too hangs, consumes all the memory and then gets killed by the OOM
> killer.  I don't think it is a memory leak, just what you get when you
> try to keep 2^14 objects in memory in a language like Python (or Perl
> or Ruby or Java...).

That's too bad. Part of our vision for Zenmap this summer was to make it
a tool that is as trusted as Nmap. If it can't handle showing a few
thousand hosts, clearly it's not there. Zenmap has a harder job than
Nmap here, because it has to show the results of a scan all at once,
where Nmap can forget about hosts after it's done scanning them. To get
Zenmap where it should be I guess will take something sophisticated,
like keeping scan files on disk and loading information from them on
demand.

David Fifield

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