Memory leak suspected, how to confirm

x_terminat_or_3 · 06-20-2007, 12:17 PM

Hi there.

My memory usage seems to go up all the time, and only goes down a little bit when closing programs.

I suspect a program is leaking memory.

How can I confirm this and identify the misbehaving program?

Thanks

Emerson · 06-20-2007, 12:35 PM

Linux Memory Management

Quakeboy02 · 06-20-2007, 12:38 PM

Please read this link about swappiness. If it will make you happy, you can change swappiness so that the tool you use to check memory load gives a different number. It's almost certain that there is no problem with your system.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/FAQ_Linux_Mem...2.6_kernels.29

nx5000 · 06-20-2007, 12:43 PM

It's either a REAL memory leak or as the two posters have said before the normal consequence of Memory Management in Linux. In Linux, free memory is considered wasted memory and should better be used as caching.

If you really think it's a memory leak, you could try E-fence or valgrind
http://freshmeat.net/projects/efence/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/valgrind/

If the memory goes up and up without you doing anything, then I would say it is a memory leak.

x_terminat_or_3 · 06-20-2007, 01:10 PM

Thanks all for the information.

Right after I posted this question, I thought... huh, why don't I just check it in top, sort by memory usage, and see which ones are increasing.

I noticed one that went steadily upwards, and that was hald monitoring hiddev0

I killed that program and my memory usage went down with 130MB, and hasn't moved since...