Hi, I am tired of memory leaks, and the first step in solving them is figuring out what is causing them.
today is a typical example. My box has been up for 5 days, running a single gdm gnome/nautilus session the entire time. mozilla has been running pretty much the entire time, with lots of windows being opened and closed. Over the course of 5 days, I notice my swap file slowly grow, but the number of apps/windows open stays the same. When the swapfile gets near full, I usually start closing applications until I have nothing open anymore, and then cycle my swapfile off and on to flush it out. However, today, as is usually the case, swapoff -a fails because it cannot allocate enough memory. Mind you, I have 512MB ram and a 256MB swap file. The only applicatios open are a gnome2 gdm session (with nautilus, no windows open), and a single window of slashdot in mozilla. Certainly, nothing which should even fill my RAM, let alone my swapfile. But top begs to differ: 19:38:02 up 5 days, 21:02, 5 users, load average: 0.09, 0.24, 0.24 103 processes: 100 sleeping, 2 running, 1 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: 0.3% user, 1.9% system, 0.0% nice, 97.8% idle Mem: 515388K total, 509860K used, 5528K free, 8K buffers Swap: 262136K total, 84496K used, 177640K free, 145820K cached PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 1525 jason 17 0 177M 176M 10148 S 0.0 35.0 69:04 mozilla-bin 1529 jason 17 0 177M 176M 10148 S 0.0 35.0 0:00 mozilla-bin 1530 jason 17 0 177M 176M 10148 S 0.0 35.0 0:10 mozilla-bin 1531 jason 17 0 177M 176M 10148 S 0.0 35.0 0:00 mozilla-bin 1532 jason 17 0 177M 176M 10148 S 0.0 35.0 0:23 mozilla-bin 6014 jason 17 0 177M 176M 10148 S 0.0 35.0 0:00 mozilla-bin 1345 root 7 -10 359M 91M 1744 S < 0.0 18.1 234:15 XFree86 1421 jason 17 0 80368 37M 4784 S 0.0 7.5 0:49 nautilus 1426 jason 17 0 80368 37M 4784 S 0.0 7.5 0:00 nautilus 1427 jason 17 0 80368 37M 4784 S 0.0 7.5 0:00 nautilus 1428 jason 17 0 80368 37M 4784 S 0.0 7.5 0:01 nautilus 1429 jason 18 0 80368 37M 4784 S 0.0 7.5 0:00 nautilus 1432 jason 18 0 80368 37M 4784 S 0.0 7.5 0:00 nautilus 1433 jason 17 0 80368 37M 4784 S 0.0 7.5 0:01 nautilus 1434 jason 17 0 80368 37M 4784 S 0.0 7.5 0:01 nautilus 31728 jason 17 0 22304 21M 15276 S 0.0 4.3 0:06 kmail 31738 jason 17 0 13744 13M 12424 S 0.0 2.6 0:00 kdeinit 31736 jason 17 0 11320 11M 10944 S 0.0 2.1 0:00 kdeinit 31733 jason 17 0 10904 10M 10596 S 0.0 2.1 0:00 kdeinit 31730 jason 17 0 10704 10M 10428 S 0.0 2.0 0:00 kdeinit 1419 jason 17 0 8152 8096 2164 S 0.0 1.5 2:26 gnome-panel 31711 jason 17 0 3408 3408 2480 S 0.0 0.6 0:00 irssi 1413 jason 17 0 3320 3316 824 S 0.0 0.6 2:38 sawfish 31704 jason 17 0 3208 3208 2132 S 0.0 0.6 0:00 xterm WTF?!? I would really appreciate it if someone could tell me what is going on here. The noteable details about my system which have remained constant while this problem has been going on are: I have always been running either the testing or unstable version of X, Gnome, and Mozilla, I have always been running the proprietary Nvidia X driver. I am currently using an older one, as the newest version manages to somehow get borked everytime i reboot, forcing me to "make install" it again. nice. Sorry for the ranty tone of this email, its just that having 512M of RAM and constantly running out of it is getting really old. Despite my bitchy attitude, I really am in search of enlightenment regarding memory allocation, ie, exactly how does one interpret all the different memory statistics, how does one nail down the source of a memory leak, etc. thanks, jason pepas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
