Memory usage too high
 

I'm having a memory usage problem on my Red Hat 7.3 system using KDE 3.0.

From a fresh boot, my system has very little memory in use. But, as the days go on, the memory usage climbs higher and higher. I've tried logging out and restarting the X-Server, to no avail. The only solution seems to be a reboot.

Here is a pic of top, sorted by memory usage. This is after only 3 days of up time:

http://sigp226.freewebspace.com/top.jpg

Notice the 363204K memory in use. Notice all of the kdeinits taking up a lot of memory.

Here is a pic of top right after a fresh boot, sorted by memory usage.

http://sigp226.freewebspace.com/top2.jpg

Notice only 161368K memory in use. Notice that the kdeinits are not taking up a lot of memory.

I am not a kde wizard but i think kdeinit is used to startup kde and kde apps within it.

As your machine runs Linux will fill the cache with items it thinks are useful. This is a good thing - free memory is a waste. In the one picture you show Linux is using almost 100M for the cache. As memory is needed the cache will be freed. As long as you are not hitting swap you are fine.

--jeremy

I'm not referring to the cache. If you look at the "Mem:" line, it says "363204K used". Why is it using that much memory, with only two applications open? When the system is first started up, it says "161368K used" (See the second screenshot). That's almost twice as much usage, with the same amount of applications loaded (only 3 apps loaded for both screenshots).

What jeremy is trying to say is that linux uses up memory, usually will fill up anything it might think is useful. unlike windows which doesn't fill up and use all the memory that is there, linux will use this to its advantage. most likely in your case its not just loading those two programs but anything else that might be useful to your system.

don't worry, its normal. if you swap file ever gets filled up, then start worrying.. :)

From the looks of the image you attached almost 130M is going towards buffers and cache. To be honest I do not use KDE and don't know what kdeinit does, but it is taking up a huge amount of memory - wouldn't know if that is normal though. You should not have hit swap with that much cache however. Was your free RAM ever totally exhusted? May have to do some VM tuning if you are worried.

--jeremy

RedHat for one is going to try to use as much memory as it can to make things run better. Like it's already been said the memory is not actually used up.


For a much better look at what's really going on here try this


cat /proc/meminfo


typically about one half up to one third of the memory shown as not free is being used. The rest is used for cache and buffer

I see what you guys are saying, but this is indeed a problem, as all the kdeinits chowing memory are slowing the system down significantly.

This is not just simple caching or buffering, something is wrong here, there is a memory leak somewhere.