memory problem

Danny Yee danny at anatomy.usyd.edu.au
Sat Jan 20 03:23:25 UTC 2007


I'm pretty sure I have some kind of memory leak.  Here's what free
reports:

# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1017876     955404      62472          0     128624     127944
-/+ buffers/cache:     698836     319040
Swap:      2040244       1652    2038592

Which suggests that I have 700MB "used".

But running ps:
# ps aux | head -n 1 | cut -c 1-100; ps aux | sort -n -r -k 4 | grep -v COMMAND | head -n 10
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
danny    26598  1.0 13.7 292692 139520 pts/0   Sl   Jan19  18:07 /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.9/firefox-bin
root     30466  1.1 13.6 145744 138984 tty7    Ss+  Jan16  66:01 /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -br -audit 0 -auth /var/gdm/:0.Xauth -nolisten tcp vt7
danny     7417  0.0  6.4 112068 65372 pts/1    S    Jan17   3:52 /usr/lib/opera/9.02-20060919.6/opera -style Bluecurve
danny     6589  0.0  1.1  16052 12012 ?        S    Jan17   0:00 /usr/bin/xpdf /tmp/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf
xfs       2262  0.0  0.6   8484  6700 ?        Ss   Jan06   0:01 xfs -droppriv -daemon
root      1946  0.0  0.6   9456  6996 ?        Ss   Jan06   0:00 /usr/sbin/restorecond
ntp       2143  0.0  0.4   4300  4300 ?        SLs  Jan06   0:00 ntpd -u ntp:ntp -p /var/run/ntpd.pid -g
root      2412  0.0  0.3  15344  3084 ?        S    Jan06   0:00 /usr/sbin/gdm-binary -nodaemon
danny    30551  0.0  0.3   9264  3220 ?        S    Jan16   0:02 xterm -geometry +5+530 -sb -n alvis1 -e ssh -C alvis
danny    30547  0.0  0.3   8508  3568 ?        S    Jan16   0:02 xterm -geometry 80x38+12+0 -font 10x20 -n root

That is, the top ten processes have about 350MB resident.  I don't
have a huge number of small processes or anything like that, so it
seems to me that about 300MB is "missing in action".

I'm running "2.6.18-1.2869.fc6 #1 SMP".

Danny.
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