On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 3:17 PM, Hans Fugal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> So I upgraded my desktop to Ubuntu 8.10 and everything is hunky dory
> except for the fact that something is slowly eating all my RAM. After
> awhile the computer starts thrashing. After a few minutes of that, the
> OOM killer comes in and starts killing things left and right, until the
> system is essentially dead. At that point I have to hard reset the
> machine. I've looked at the system while it was swapping and didn't see
> what I'd expect.
>
> That is, I didn't see anything using considerable RAM. No program in top
> is listed as having even modest RAM allocated. Yet the free memory
> continues to drop, and the swap usage continues to rise, until swap runs
> out and the system comes crashing down.
>
> Since it doesn't seem to be a program I can inspect in top, does that
> mean the kernel has some kind of memory leak? How can I inspect the
> memory usage of the kernel and/or find the program or module or whatever
> that is eating my RAM and not returning it?
>
> --
> Hans Fugal ; http://hans.fugal.net
>
> There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the
> right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
>    -- Johann Sebastian Bach
>

Is there an earlier kernel you can use?  I assume you're sorting in top by
memory used?  How much memory do you have?  You might want to look into
swapd and "and" (autonice daemon) as a temporary measure.  I use to rely on
those when a left over Netscape browser could eat your resources for lunch.
swapd will allocate extra swapfiles on the fly if you're running too low on
swap.

Cheers,


Scott Edwards

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