[CLUE-Tech] memory leak

[Ed Hill]

On Sat, 2002-01-12 at 17:32, Collins Richey wrote:
> [ snips ]
> 
> On Sun, 13 Jan 2002 00:23:11 -0000
> jason at matchingmoms.com wrote:
> 
> > My system is leaking memory.  When my system first boots up and launches all
> > the services it's leaving 300MB of 384MB available.  My memory usage keeps
> > climbing until, after a few days, I've only got a few MB left of 384MB
> > available.  I've examined by processes and don't see anything zombied or
> > anything that looks out of place.
> 
> Unless I miss my guess, this is probably quite normal.  Linux doesn't necessarily 
> free up used memory until it is needed again.  So, as long as you are not using 

Yes!

In all likelihood, you *don't* have a memory leak.  What Linux does is
to cache disk accesses as much as possible and to swap out to disk
memory pages that are unused for a "long" time.  Basically, the Virtual
Memory system is trying to make the most of the memory/disks you have by
migrating unused pages out to swap space (onto the disk) and pulling 
often-accessed files into the memory.  The net result of these actions
(over time) should be nearly 95--99% memory use and a small (when seen
as a fraction of the total RAM) amount of swap usage.  So what you see
is both normal and good behavior.

If you'd like to check if an individual process is leaking memory, you
can monitor it (to some extent) with /usr/sbin/lsof.

hth,
Ed


-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
Post-Doctoral Researcher   |  Email:       ed at eh3.com, ehill at mines.edu
Division of ESE            |  URL:         http://www.eh3.com
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