In the last several months (well at least since I joined this list) I
have been listening to people go on and on about the virtues of the
different linux flavors. When I originally installed linux I installed
Redhat 4.something. Well this was not my first attempt, I tried working
with linux back around 95-96 but, it would not do what I was looking for
so I waited. And watched. Then about 2+ years ago I stumbled across a
copy of Redhat, and fell in love. Well anyway I now have two linux boxes
I use at work (and 3 at home) for various admin tasks that are both
Redhat based. Security was never an issue for me since I sit behind a
rather hearty firewall, and Redhat seemed to suit me just fine. Now
being an engineer I am never content to just leave well enough alone. I
am always trying to make everything work better (Never ask my wife about
the VCR.....), so of late I have decided to try the other flavors of
linux. My first attempt was with Mandrake, mainly because the iso image
for Mandrake finished downloading first. At first it seemed to work very
well. The system seemed very stable and I had no complaints. Until just
recently.
In the last several weeks, I have noticed that the OS does not seem to
be releasing memory correctly. The machine is a dual Pentium Pro 200
with 196 MB. I was working on the box one day and I noticed that the
drive seemed to be running a lot. Most of what I do on the system does
not access the disk much. It mostly runs a couple of different Java
apps. So I began to investigate and found (through top) that all of the
system memory was tied up and the machine was swapping like crazy. So I
shut all of the apps down and checked the memory again. It was still
running heavily in swap, but nothing appeared to be using much ram. So
I shut everything down. Samba, Apache, ypbind, everything I could think
of. There was a change, but only a very slight one. So I did something I
NEVER do on my Redhat box, I rebooted it. When it came back up it all
was normal. So I shrugged my shoulders and went back to work. Two days
later the same damn thing happened again. Again, the only workaround I
could find was a reboot. I HATE rebooting Unix/Linux boxes, I have to
reboot my NT box enough as is.
So now to my question(s).
1) How do I find out what app is tying up all of my memory? Top does not
list any one app as chewing up all the RAM.
2) Is there a way to force a memory cleanup? (IE force all of the apps
to "claim" there allocated memeory?)
3) Is this a problem with Mandrake (v7.1)? (Or is this a PEBKAC
problem?)
4) Am I going crazy?
5) Or could this be a problem with the SMP? This is the first time I
have ever run Linux on a dual processor machine, so I have no idea if
this could be related (I really doubt it, but in my line of work I have
learned to question all things computer related)
If anybody has any ideas on this I would really appreciate hearing them.
I have several Sun Sparc 10's (all dual processors) that I am about to
install linux (Either Redhat or Debian. Debian is next on my list of
OS's to try so we will see.) on and I need to figure this out, before I
dig my present hole any deeper.
Thanks.
Garl
--
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Garl R. Grigsby
Customer Applications Engineering - Analysis Team
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Structural Dynamics Research Corporation Phone: (800)242-7372
TAO Americas Support Center FAX: (541)342-8277
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Eugene, OR 97402 Internet:
http://www.sdrc.com
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