I was just wondering if somebody could give me a hand fixing my system. It appears I have some short of memory leak. I leave my computer on all day and night....its something I've always done and will continue doing.

When I goto work at 6am and come home at 4pm my resources are zapped down to nothing. Nothings running that I know of...I've tried leaving things or and turning everything off....but it still does it.

Is there some way I can tell what is eating my resources with such a slow leak?

Sounds like a problem Windows people would have.

Possibly you might have a virus that keeps replicating e-mails from your address book and waiting for you to get on line again. I presume you don't leave your computer connected to the Internet all day while you're gone at work - if you are, you're just asking for trouble. Install a hardware firewall.

Mozilla (and a couple of other wayward apps) can eat ram over time, but usually shuting them down fixes that...

I leave my PC on 24/7 and most of the time on the net as well, though I have a smoothwall box conecting the home net to the internet...

What kernel are you using. A generic kernel.org kernel gives best results IMO...

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...t=memory+usage
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...t=memory+usage

Okay, I suppose we should ask by what you mean when you say your resources are eaten away. What do things like free and top say? What problems ar you encountering, like is the swap space continually increasing, etc...

Ok heres the deal.... I put the resource monitor on my Gnome bar next to my clock... It shows my Memory and cache usage and I have another one down there for my CPU usage.

First off I have 2 hardware firewalls...I have a Linksys/Cisco router with all but 3 ports closed. The other is an older 450mhz Fedora Core box with all but the same 3 ports closed....I've never had a problem with anyone knocking on my door before, so I don't know why it would start now. Its not an email problem, my email is webmail based. They only attachments I get are pictures that I can view in my messages.

By default when you put the memory monitor on the Gnome bar the colors are blue, green, and light green. When I start up my computer you can barely see the 3 colors at all. By the time I either come home from work or wake up in the morning each color takes up about a 1/3 of the entire box. The system doesn't slow down very much, but FPS games like UT2004 or CS become pretty laggy.

Like I said before.....it happens even if nothing is running besides what starts on a normal boot.

If I goto the System Monitor and check things from the real time memory and CPU check, I go from 72megs of RAM at normal boot to about 400megs... CPU usage is slightly increased, but appears normal for the memory load.

Forgot to post these...

Fedora Core 3 (2.6.10)
1GB PC 2700
Athlon 2600+ Barton 1.9ghz
Geforce 6800 GT OC
250GB HD

Theres a slightly newer 2.6.10 kernel out than the one I have. I saw it on up2date, but I'm scared it will mess up my video and sound drivers...along with a few other linked programs. So I didn't update yet

It's probably just normal ram usage, but you will have to send the results of the command

free

for us to tell, thanks...

Not sure about the game lagging. This could happen if you do have something eating ram, but need the results of the free command to really tell as this gives some actual memory figures...

Not a problem....I'll post the results this afternoon when I get off work.

No doubt about it....I HAVE TO leave my computer on.....I'll miss to many important messages if its off all day.

No problem leaving it on IMO. I never switch off... I didn't even realize they had an off switch

[root@localhost nate]# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1035980 801712 234268 0 293652 145596
-/+ buffers/cache: 362464 673516
Swap: 2031608 0 2031608

Its not totally maxed out this time...but its close the light green color is only about a 1/4 of the size the green and blue is this time.
The monitor says : 79% in use of which 15% is cache - That seems really high considering they start at about 8%

Well, to me the memory usage looks normal. You have 1 gig of ram and linux is 'using' 800 meg of that and 234meg is untouched, even by cahce and buffers. Linux will always try to use all available ram. Any ram not used as application memory usually gets used as cache and buffers, so linux is likely to 'use' that other 200meg as it goes along.

The second line gives the memory usage - buffers - ie so you are using 362meg and have 673meg free. This gives 'real' memory usage if you like.

The last line is swap. You are not using any of the 2 gig of swap (you probably don't need 2 gig swap, but doesn't matter.) If you start using swap, especially in a system with a gig of ram, then you know you have problems.

So that looks fine. Not sure why game would be jerky, but watch what apps are running in the background when playing game. Some system monitors, like KSysGuard, tend to make the game jerky and slower... Maybe the gnome monitor does as well, don't know. I can run the little kde memory applet on my bar okay when playing games...

BTW this is my free result as a comparison. Tho this box has only been up a couple of days. Currently only running KMail and Firefox and a few other small apps. I have more swap than I need at the moment too, but it's a leftover from compiling counterstrike maps
Note that all the ram is 'used', but half in cache and buffers.

[amosf@shiva rpms]$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515288 507224 8064 0 36820 200468
-/+ buffers/cache: 269936 245352
Swap: 1129384 1676 1127708