Memory leaks

[Stan Bubrouski]

On Tue, 2004-01-20 at 02:24, =?ISO-8859-1?Q? Nils O. Sel=E5sdal?= wrote:
> [noselasd at nos-rh tmp]$ free
>              total       used       free      
> Mem:        513984     492776      21208     
> -/+ buffers/cache:     199776     314208
> Swap:       522104      29468     492636
> 
> You do look at the correct info ? The above has about 314Mb free, not 
> 21Mb. That's probably as good as you get any info on memory, it's not 
> always the whole truth though.
> 

Yeah I used free, I never use nor trust top at all.  And yes I did look
at the right row :-P

I started noticing this recently, specifically when I had my machine on
for 13 days.  I noticed it was getting very very sluggish (my drives are
quiet so I don't notice the noise most people do when SWAP is in use),
and I ran free it showed like 17mb free RAM and almost half a gig of
SWAP.

So I exited X, shutdown all non-essential services (I have very few
running, this is a desktop).  Basically with no process larger than
2-3mb the system was still without RAM and still using a ton of SWAP.

I'm keeping my eye open for who might be the culprit.  I use a lot of
multimedia stuff on this machine so things like mplayer and X and such
that get left open for days when I'm away are possible culprits.  I've
used Linux for years, I had a desktop machine running on a p166 for 6
months without a prob back in the days, but I've never seen memory
disposal like this...

-sb