On 08/04/2017 21:33, Helmut Jarausch wrote: > Hi, > > since a few days my system eats up memory, uses SWAP space and gets slow. > It might depend on xorg-server, but I don't know why. > > On a nearly idle system (except xorg-server and some XTerms) I have > MEM | tot 7.5G | free 2.9G | cache 1.2G | buff 114.6M | > slab 498.0M | shmem 848.3M | vmbal 0.0M | hptot 0.0M > > (My system has 8G memory installed) > > Adding up all terms except 'tot' I get 5.6G where are the remaining 2G? > And why is shmem 0.85G - I have even seen a value of 4G for shmem > although all tempfs filesystems > were nearly empty.
Lots of things use shared memory. All you know here is that something is using lots of it > > When I stop the X-server I get > > MEM | tot 7.5G | free 6.9G | cache 387.4M | buff 118.4M | > slab 72.0M | shmem 1.4M | vmbal 0.0M | hptot 0.0M | When you stop the X-server you also stop all the X-clients, so of course all the memory the culprit is using gets released. This is expected > > > I haven't seen this in the last 10 years! well, you are seeing it now <shrug> > > I'm running kernel 4.11.0-rc5 but I doubt it has to do with the kernel > since the values without a running xorg-server are for the same kernel. > > Has anybody seen something similar? Yes. You have something allocating gobs and gobs of memory for itself. Most likely, some recently updated package has a memory leak and it grows and grows till it consumes all memory, then the system swaps, then it falls over, then all your kitty cats died. You haven't done much useful to track it down. Find the process that is really using memory. A very quick easy first step is to run top and sort on the memory columns (just take the left-most memory-related column with a big bag of salt, it doesn't show what people usually think). Then correlate that with packages you recently updated. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
