[ale] Funny Mem Usage

[Jeff Hubbs]

> OK, you've got 110-odd MB in the cache (buffers and pages), and
> another 50 or so in process VM pages, even allowing for the fact
> that many of those pages are shared (eg the kdeinit procs are all
> sharing the text pages in their working sets). That leaves 60MB or
> so unaccounted.
> 
> A number of things could be using that memory. Most obviously, if
> the rest of the processes on your machine are not sharing much,
> they might account for a lot of that in a nickel-and-dime fashion.
> If you've got some strange hardware driver that uses a lot of
> memory, or some strange hardware driver that leaks memory (:(),
> that could be it. Also, if your machine handles a lot of net traffic
> (eg is a router/firewall), then the IP stack might be sucking down
> a chunk-o-RAM. Pages allocated by the kernel for internal use
> (including the kernel text pages themselves) are not accounted
> in /proc/meminfo, which (I'm pretty sure) is where top gets
> its memory data.
> 
> -- Joe

Joe -

Your points are well-taken, but in this case, the machine was doing
nothing special other than running SETI at Home.  When SAH is stopped, the
"green" part of xosview's memory bar steps down by a reasonable amount. 
It's like this when the machine first boots, so I don't feel it's a
memory leak condition (of the sort that I'm used to from Netscape).  I
had thought it might make a difference if I weren't X-over-sshing to the
machine like I was when I first noticed the behavior, but it's the same
when I'm actually sitting at the machine.

- Jeff
--
To unsubscribe: mail majordomo at ale.org with "unsubscribe ale" in message body.