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Where does the memory go?

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Operating Systems Linux Where does the memory go?
# 8  
Old 07-14-2009
what is the output of the free command?
# 9  
Old 07-15-2009
Quote:
Originally Posted by Corona688
That big honking thing leaking 40% of your RAM and counting looks like your X server. Note how its actual memory consumption is way higher than the amount still paged in(RSS), its allocating lots of memory, not using it, and having it paged out to make room for more! Try upgrading it.

(You can avoid the lines getting cut off by redirecting ps into a file or pipe, by the way.)
Corona, thank you. I haven't managed to update it yet, but it looks like you've identified the problem. It's definitely a slow memory leak -- when I first start the system it's taking a much smaller piece of RAM.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sixstrings
what is the output of the free command?
It's not too bad right now -- I only started the system 8 hours ago.
Code:
~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3401       1913       1488          0         96        484
-/+ buffers/cache:       1331       2069
Swap:         5083          0       5083

# 10  
Old 07-17-2009
The key line in your free output is the buffers/cache line.

Linux will make use of unused memory, and you want it to do this. I will cache things it thinks it may need in the future, almost like read-ahead on hard drives (very simple example and not totally accurate, but works for this).

As an application requires more memory, the kernel will flush some of the cache out to free up memory. So looking at that output, you have slightly over 2GB free.
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