Memory leaks

[Peter Backlund]

Stan Bubrouski wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> I've noticed using latest devel packages and devel kernel packages
> (compiled specifically for my hardware) that after a couple days of
> uptime in X my machine basically loses 450/512mb of RAM.  So say i exit
> X and shutoff all non-essential services my machine still only has like
> 45mb of free ram.  So basically something is leaking a lot of memory
> over a very short period of time.

How are you measuring the amount of free ram? What top reports as used 
memory is not actually allocated by applications, but instead cached and 
buffered disk read/writes etc. Linux almost always uses all your ram to 
speed up various operations that way.

Look at /proc/meminfo. Physical ram in use by applications is:

MemTotal - (MemFree + Buffers + Cached).

/Peter