[NBLUG/talk] memory leak question

[E Frank Ball III]

On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 10:43:01AM -0700, Kyle Rankin wrote:
 > On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 10:19:37AM -0700, Sean wrote:
 > > I suspect I might be having a memory leak problem, but I don't know
 > > how to check for it properly.
 > 
 > 
 > greenfly at minimus:~$ free
 >              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
 > Mem:       1026288    1002648      23640          0       5820     447888
 > -/+ buffers/cache:     548940     477348
 > Swap:      1052216      34776    1017440
 > 
 > It might look like I've used almost all of my 1Gb of RAM on this system
 > according to the used column, but look at the far right to the cached
 > column. It shows that I have 447Mb cached. When you open files, if Linux
 > has spare RAM, it actually caches some of those open files into memory. The
 > idea is, if you have RAM to spare, the next time you open the file, it will
 > open much faster since it's already in RAM.
 > 
 > Because of this, at first glance basically all Linux systems will appear to
 > be consuming all available RAM after the system has been up for awhile. The
 > best way to check the actual used RAM is to skip down to to the -/+
 > buffers/cache. If you look there you'll see that I have 548940Kb actually
 > in use, and 477348Kb free.

I use a gizmo called xosview (it's in Debian).  It shows memory usage
broken down into user/buffer/cache on a bar graph.

And Firefox will suck up lots of memory over time.  I need to restart it
every few days.

-- 

   E Frank Ball                frankb at frankb.us