Hey all,

I've discovered a rather interesting problem with my computer. I'm curiously running out of memory, little by little. My computer is running Slackware 10.0 and for desktop I have KDE 3.4.0. I've had this problem for some time now, but only now I've identified it.

When I boot my machine and start up, everything in running nicely. The computer is at that time, using about 200 Mb of memory. My box has a total of 256 Mb. There on after, the memory gets slowly reserved. When I monitor it with top, I can see the total memory in use increasing about 10-20 kb per every few seconds. It continues until all physical memory is used and then it starts to fill up swap memory. When swap runs out, the computer will turn sluggish and neigh unbearable to use.

A reboot is the only thing that helps and it only helps for a little while. All memory is on average consumed in two or three days usually.

Does anyone have an idea what could be causing this or better, how to fix this?

A leaky application.

Watch top, see what program's using the most memory. If feasable, kill it. If not, look for an alternative program. Maybe it's KDE, have you tried another desktop environment?

Cheers,
Aaron

look at what programs you are running durring the memory leak. Also, may check top for which process may continue to increase their mem usage. reinstall whatever it is. may be a bug

I haven't tried another desktop enviroment in a while, but I have used fluxbox, gnome, and windowmaker in the past and I've always experienced the same problem.

I tried monitoring applications, while running some of the commnon things I use. It might seem that everything is fine as long as I don't put in use enough
programs to exceed my physical memory capacity. When that happens, and swap is used, things go bad, 'cause the swap is not released; or not nearly entirely at
least. So whenever swap it used, it's not freed.

I can't see anyone application taking overly much memory; only amarok and X take any significant amount of memory. Amarok about 17% and X takes memory according to how many apps I'm running at that moment. With Firefox and Amarok on, it's about 17% too.

Is there a way to manually free memory from swap? I'm thinking of buying more RAM this week. Any ideas if that would help?