Basic 9.1 install... ext3... 256meg swapfile...

running Top

my free system memory gets gobbled up at about 4kb a sec. Even when only running a term and top.

Is this the cache building up?
When will it stop?

I have turned off all but primary processes. And when I add up all the memory used in Top... it is no ware neer the total memory used.

Any ideas?

The memory reporting in 'top' is often confusing; if there are 10 processes of 'foo' using a total of 10MB of memory, it'll show each one as using 10MB.

Go to a console and type 'free' to see how much memory you really do have available:

Under the 'used' column, the second number is the amount of memory actually in use, IIRC. It looks like I have 129MB in use, out of 512MB, and I have about 74 processes running. You probably don't need to worry about memory leaks

I'm actually having the same problem, but with a slackware 8.1 install. I've upgraded a bunch obviously (kernel to 2.4.22, sshd, etc). Only thing left running now is sendmail,sshd and a few minor processes by inetd (pop3/talk). memory still disappears from `free` at about 4k/s. Have no idea where it goes, but I think it is the kernel. Not much ram on the machine (its a really old box). I've checked everything, the only ideas left are somehow a leak in the kernel, or a bad ram stick.

Memory: 191372k/196608k available (1686k kernel code, 4848k reserved, 635k data, 116k init, 0k highmem)

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 191488 186148 5340 0 3896 110064

any ideas would be greatly appriciated.

i have been using slack since 1997. i just installed off the 9.1 iso and there is definitely a leak somewhere here. i compiled a fresh 2.4.23 kernel straight from kernel.org, moving off the distro 2.4.22 kernel. i compiled everything statically and have no modules inserted. i killed everything but system processes and memory was dissapearing at about 8k every 2-3 seconds, yet no process is claiming responsibility. i've never run into this before. i'm looking into it and will post back if i find anything out. fyi, my memory usage went from 30 megs in console (normal) to 70 megs in about 15 minutes, so the leak does not appear to be linear.

well that was quick.

https://listman.redhat.com/archives/.../msg00124.html

that should answer your questions. this is the first time i've used ext3, hence my first run in with this. if you don't dig the idle memory usage for whatever reason, you should be able to go back to ext2 and be fine.

mad love.

edit:
forgive the redhat post :>

well, that makes perfect sense, no reason to switch to ext2. Thanks.