Memory leak - somewhere :)
Hello ppl, I have a Debian 3.0 installation on my P4 2.2 512MB with 256MB Swap system. I use KDE 3.1. For sometime, I've been feeling that there's a memory leak in one of the apps because after quite a few days of use KDE becomes slow. Apps I typically use are KMail,Konqueror,KMerlin,Konsole,K3B. I've noticed that memory seems to be consumed at an alarmingly huge rate. Sometimes about 300MB+ gets used up overnight inspite of no additional programs being run. For e.g. if with a clean boot into KDE I have 300MB of free Physical memory left (as displayed by free) and the whole swap free then the next morning I may see just 5MB of Physical memory free and the Swap used to a degree. I thought it could be KDE or artsd or some such component/app and I kept rebooting my system with one less program running each time i.e. i'd turn on KDE and not switch on KMail and see how it performs and next time wouldn't switch on KMail and K3b,etc.did this till i basically had a bare KDE session running but the memory usage issue continued. I therefore thought it may be X and I just put a # in the default-display-manager file in /etc/X11, therefore since there's no default manager I just get a message stating that at bootup and X doesn't come up. If I do a free in succession with just this much I notice that my memory is going down at a rate of 8KB each successive reduction.this is most of the time...although sometimes reductions can be of different sizes. I can't make much of it.is this normal?? doesn't look like it should.since I'm basically not turning on any programs...therefore something seems to be up...any help on either clarifying my understanding on the above or tracing the rogue program would be appreciatedhas neone else noticed something similar. Thanks Bye -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Memory leak - somewhere :)
Jeetu Golani [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I have a Debian 3.0 installation on my P4 2.2 512MB with 256MB Swap system. I use KDE 3.1. For sometime, I've been feeling that there's a memory leak in one of the apps because after quite a few days of use KDE becomes slow. Apps I typically use are KMail,Konqueror,KMerlin,Konsole,K3B. I've noticed that memory seems to be consumed at an alarmingly huge rate. Sometimes about 300MB+ gets used up overnight inspite of no additional programs being run. For e.g. if with a clean boot into KDE I have 300MB of free Physical memory left (as displayed by free) and the whole swap free then the next morning I may see just 5MB of Physical memory free and the Swap used to a degree. I thought it could be KDE or artsd or some such component/app and I kept rebooting my system with one less program running each time i.e. i'd turn on KDE and not switch on KMail and see how it performs and next time wouldn't switch on KMail and K3b,etc.did this till i basically had a bare KDE session running but the memory usage issue continued. I therefore thought it may be X and I just put a # in the default-display-manager file in /etc/X11, therefore since there's no default manager I just get a message stating that at bootup and X doesn't come up. If I do a free in succession with just this much I notice that my memory is going down at a rate of 8KB each successive reduction.this is most of the time...although sometimes reductions can be of different sizes. I can't make much of it.is this normal?? doesn't look like it should.since I'm basically not turning on any programs...therefore something seems to be up...any help on either clarifying my understanding on the above or tracing the rogue program would be appreciatedhas neone else noticed something similar. This has got to be in a FAQ somewhere. In all my years of using Linux and reading mailing lists and Usenet I've seen this question more than any other. Anyway... Linux allocates all free memory for disk cache. If an application requests memory and all of it is being used by the disk cache then Linux frees up some of the memory being used by the disk cache for the application. On a healthy system, that you've been using for a while, you should have very little free memory. That doesn't mean you don't have something that's leaking memory, it just means you'll have to look harder to find out if there is indeed something sucking up memory. Gary -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Memory leak - somewhere :)
Jeetu Golani said: I can't make much of it.is this normal?? doesn't look like it should.since I'm basically not turning on any programs...therefore something seems to be up...any help on either clarifying my understanding on the above or tracing the rogue program would be appreciatedhas neone else noticed something similar. try running 'top' and while in top press the 'M' key that will sort the processes by memory usage. also it would help, when your system is dug deep into swap run: ps auxw ~/ps.log and include that in your next message(preferably post it on a web or ftp site). nate -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Memory leak - somewhere :)
Jeetu Golani [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: For sometime, I've been feeling that there's a memory leak in one of the apps because after quite a few days of use KDE becomes slow. Apps I typically use are KMail,Konqueror,KMerlin,Konsole,K3B. I've noticed that memory seems to be consumed at an alarmingly huge rate. Sometimes about 300MB+ gets used up overnight inspite of no additional programs being run. For e.g. if with a clean boot into KDE I have 300MB of free Physical memory left (as displayed by free) and the whole swap free then the next morning I may see just 5MB of Physical memory free and the Swap used to a degree. You could post the output of 'free' that causes you to believe that. Or read a Linux FAQ, any one, it doesn't matter: Linux considers it better to use memory to improve performance (e.g. by doing disk caching) than just let it sit idle, so you'll typically have very little physical memory free without the system performance being degraded at all. -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/ Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal. -- Abra Mitchell -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
