This is just a hunch but I think filesystem caching is not counted towards a process' memory usage, so if you are playing a large movie a large chunk (or the whole file) may be kept in memory by the filesystem driver while being memory that is 'available' for immediate freeing it is counted as %used but not as process used since it's the driver/kernel.
2016-08-03 15:23 GMT+03:00 Shlomi Fish <shlo...@gmail.com>: > Hi all! > > I reported a bug in VLC earlier today about it causing increasing total RAM > consumption: > > https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/17241 > > However, the strange thing is when it happens, the %MEM usage of the system > increases, but I don't see it in htop/top (as root)'s individual processes' > RAM consumption. And the memory gets freed after I quit VLC Player. > > Why? How is it possible? Where does all the memory go? > > I'm on mageia v6 x86-64 with : > > shlomif@telaviv1:~$ uname -a > Linux telaviv1.shlomifish.org 4.7.0-desktop-2.mga6 #1 SMP Sat Jul 30 > 21:54:30 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux > > Is this a bug somewhere? Any insights will be appreciated. > > Regards, > > -- Shlomi Fish > > -- > Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ > > You can never truly appreciate The Gilmore Girls until you've watched it in > the original Klingon. > > Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-il mailing list > Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il > http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il > _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
