I think you may actually be running into a problem with the X server -
I've
been noticing that it doesn't always return resources (especially
allocated
memory) back to the OS. (I can't seem to reproduce the situations
though).
Try restarting X and see if that improves performance.
Note: the Linux kernel will grab as much of physical memory as it can
for
I/O buffers (a major performance improvement). So if you're looking at
memory usage from the top few lines of top's output, its not a good
indicator of the system's memory usage. Be more concerned about the
memory usage of individual processes.
Benjamin Scott wrote:
>
> On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, PK Whelan wrote:
> > Just a dumb question. Are there any utilities to clean (I should say
> > "reclaim") unused memory upon execution of the utility? I have one for NT
> > that actually works sometimes (other times rendering it useless).
>
> Not for Linux. A memory leak on Linux is considered a serious bug. The
> kernel will always reclaim unused memory. If you find memory is gradually
> being eaten up, it means that a program (perhaps a component of KDE) is
> allocating memory but never releasing it. It isn't "unused", as far as
> anybody or anything can tell, so you cannot free it.
>
> What kernel version are you running ("uname -r" will tell you). Certain
> releases of the kernel *do* have memory leak bugs that have since been fixed.
> 2.2.11 is a recent example.
>
> > I have 128M in my box at home and always seems to be running still a
> > little sluggish when it's been up for a while - with nothing more than an
> > xterm open (but I am running kde).
>
> Try logging out and logging back in again. That should restart all of KDE
> and restart the X server, freeing any memory they have allocated but not
> released.
>
> > Top and free generally report no more than 2 or 3 megs of free memory.
>
> Run the "top" command, and then press "M" (upper-case letter M). That will
> sort processes by their memory usage. What is using the most memory?
>
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