Asterisk Memory Usage

So, I recently went and updated my google password, as I do every so often, and managed to get most things updated fairly quickly. However, it seems I forgot about my asterisk server.

I have my asterisk server configured to connect in with my Google Voice account via jabber, just like GTalk does, so I can use my desk phone to make and receive phone calls. Seeing as how I don’t make or receive a ton of calls, I didn’t really notice that asterisk could no longer connect to Google Voice. That is, until the server started crashing…

At first it crashed, and I didn’t really look too deeply into it. The server I have asterisk running on is a VM running on VirtualBox on my mac. VirtualBox isn’t known for having rock solid kernel drivers, so I chocked it up to a fluke. Then I went and took a look this afternoon at my system stats graphs, and noticed the ram was totally used up, and the swap space was rapidly diminishing. Doing a little digging I saw it was the asterisk process, and logging into the asterisk CLI, saw a billion errors about it complaining of an incorrect password.

A-HA!

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I fixed the password and now asterisk is happy and not making my server all crashy. Also I filed a bug report. I kinda figure crashing a system is not the intended failure mode for an incorrect password.

Here’s some pretty graphs of memory and swap usage during the crashy period.