Where does the memory go? Post: 302327370

Sponsored Content

Operating Systems Linux Where does the memory go? Post 302327370 by glen.barber on Sunday 21st of June 2009 07:05:17 AM

06-21-2009

Registered User

Quote:

Originally Posted by CRGreathouse

I've been running a bit low on memory recently, so I decided to find out where it's going. Obviously my browser is pretty memory-intensive, but I'm not sure there's much I can do about that (short of browsing less, all I can do is tune settings and/or change browsers). So I opened the system monitor and closed out the biggest memory users: firefox, soffice.bin, evolution*, and evince (I had a decent-sized PDF open). After closing those the memory use came down a bit: the largest memory users remaining were nautilus and gedit at 16 and 10 MB, respectively; everything else was taking a very small amount of RAM.

Most (some) UNIX systems will fill memory intentionally. This is done to prevent paging as much as possible. Unless your disk is thrashing, I see no real problem here. (You haven't told us how much memory you have though.)

Quote:

But the total memory use was still above 800 MiB: I calculated 810-812 MB not accounted for in the system monitor. The system monitor helpfully reported: "51% in use from programs, 11% for the cache" or something similar. Why is memory use so high? Vista only requires 512 MB; I have trouble believing that Ubuntu is greedier.

So I guess my questions come down to:
1. What is using the remaining 800 MB?
2. How can I reasonably conserve memory?
3. How long before someone tells me to buy another 2GB? Smilie

* Why was evolution running in the first place? I don't use it and I've never opened it.

Autostart at login? Check your session startup list.

glen.barber

View Public Profile for glen.barber

Find all posts by glen.barber

9 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. Programming

how to round up a memory address(memory alignment problem)

Hi, I try to marshal a unsigned int and a char * into a buffer, and then unmarshal them later to get them out. I need to put the char * in the front and unsigned int at the end of the buffer. However, my system always give me "BUS ERROR". I am using Sun Sparcs Sloris 2.10. My code to marshal...

2. HP-UX

How can I get memory usage or anything that show memory used from sar file?

Refer from title: How can i get memory used or anything that can show memory from sar file example on solaris:- we can use sar with option to show memory used at time that sar crontab run. on HP-UX, it not has option to see memory used. But i think it may be have some parameter or some...

3. AIX

ulimits max locked memory virtual memory

Hi, Would any one be so kind to explain me : are ulimits defined for each user seperately ? When ? Specialy what is the impact of : max locked memory and virtual memory on performance of applications for a user. Many thanks. PS : this is what I can see in MAN : ulimit ] ...

4. Solaris

How to find Total and Free Physical Memory and Logical Memory in SOLARIS 9

Hi, Im working on Solaris 9 on SPARC-32 bit running on an Ultra-80, and I have to find out the following:- 1. Total Physical Memory in the system(total RAM). 2. Available Physical Memory(i.e. RAM Usage) 3. Total (Logical) Memory in the system 4. Available (Logical) Memory. I know...

5. Programming

How to deal with lots of data in memory in order not to run out of memory

Hi, I'm trying to learn how to manage memory when I have to deal with lots of data. Basically I'm indexing a huge file (5GB, but it can be bigger), by creating tables that holds offset <-> startOfSomeData information. Currently I'm mapping the whole file at once (yep!) but of course the...

6. Solaris

restrcit physical memory with zone.max-locked-memory

Is it possible to restrict physical memory in solaris zone with zone.max-locked-memory just like we can do with rcapd ? I do not want to used rcapd

7. UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Out of Memory error when free memory size is large

I was running a program and it stopped and showed "Out of Memory!". at that time, the RAM used by this process is around 4G and the free memory size of the machine is around 30G. Does anybody know what maybe the reason? this program is written with Perl. the OS of the machine is Solaris U8. And I...

8. Solaris

relationship or difference between entitled memory and locked memory

Hello solaris experts, Being new to solaris containers, from Linux, feeling difficulty in understanding certain concepts. Hope somebody can help me here. I understand that, & some questions .... Locked memory -- memory which will not be swapped out at any cause. is this for...

9. Solaris

[DOUBT] Memory high in idle process on Solaris 10 (Memory Utilization > 90%)

Hi Experts, Our servers running Solaris 10 with SAP Application. The memory utilization always >90%, but the process on SAP is too less even nothing. Why memory utilization on solaris always looks high? I have statement about memory on solaris, is this true: Memory in solaris is used for...

LEARN ABOUT SUSE

numastat

NUMACTL(8)						   Linux Administrator's Manual 						NUMACTL(8)

NAME

       numastat - Print statistics about NUMA memory allocation

SYNOPSIS

       numastat

DESCRIPTION

       numastat  displays  NUMA  allocations  statistics from the kernel memory allocator.  Each process has NUMA policies that specifies on which
       node pages are allocated. See set_mempolicy(2) or numactl(8) on details of the available policies.  The numastat  counters  keep  track	on
       what nodes memory is finally allocated.

       The counters are separated for each node. Each count event is the allocation of a page of memory.

       numa_hit is the number of allocations where an allocation was intended for that node and succeeded there.

       numa_miss shows how often an allocation was intended for this node, but ended up on another node due to low memory.

       numa_foreign  is  the  number of allocations that were intended for another node, but ended up on this node.  Each numa_foreign event has a
       numa_miss on another node.

       interleave_hit is the number of interleave policy allocations that were intended for a specific node and succeeded there.

       local_node is incremented when a process running on the node allocated memory on the same node.

       other_node is incremented when a process running on another node allocated memory on that node.

SEE ALSO

       numactl(8) set_mempolicy(2) numa(3)

NOTES

       numastat output is only available on NUMA systems.

       numastat assumes the output terminal has a width of 80 characters and tries to format the output accordingly.

EXAMPLES

       watch -n1 numastat
       watch -n1 --differences=accumulative numastat

FILES

       /sys/devices/system/node/node*/numastat

BUGS

       The output formatting on machines with a large number of nodes could be improved.

SuSE Labs							     Nov 2004								NUMACTL(8)