On 10/20/2015 11:33 PM, Jörg-Volker Peetz wrote:
Marc Shapiro wrote on 10/21/2015 06:52:
<snip>
Something is not freeing up memory. It may, or may not be Firefox, but... I
can exit all programs and all instances of X, leaving only a single console
running. Top will show itself and bash, nothing else, but free can show over
2GB used. If I then reboot, free will show only about 250 MB used. Obviously
something was tying up nearly 2 GB and it took a reboot to free it up.
Marc
Which version of free you are using?
Where does it show 2 GB?
Do the 2 GB comprise buffered and cached data?
Please, show the the output of free.
Don Armstrong had also suggested checking the cache and buffers, which I
had forgotten to do when I restarted. I checked them yesterday and,
yes, that is where most of the memory was going after I had exited all X
sessions. Google was my friend and showed me how to free up that memory
('free && sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && free' as root)
and all is now good with the world.
Thanks, everyone, for the help. If I had just looked more closely at
the output of 'free' I could have done this myself. (Forehead slap).
Marc