Whenever I start up my laptop and log into Mandrake about 180 out of my 512 ram is being used with 79 processes running...
although after I use my laptop for a bit and after let it to go into stand by(sometimes with like 82-84 processes running), my used ram jumps up to 480 when i leave stand by mode although i still have the same processes running pretty much, anyone know how i could solve this since it slows down my CPU a lot.
thanks

Have you looked at each process to see if its a runaway?

Run 'top' also and see whats being used the most.

i ran 'top' and X is at the top. followed by kdeinitt,superkaramba(running liquidweather and cynapses), init and net_applet, mdkapplet(goes from top to bottom at times)
it almost seems like the RAM doesnt get freed up once its been used by a program...

ram gets used first the swap -- if a program exits and then a new progra needs that memory linux releases it.

I've noticed the same; used memory increases steadily. And tht's not including buffers or cache. I typically have 3 aterm, opera and XFce-4.2 running
and at boot it starts with ~70MB used then increasing to somewhere around 400 MB over a week or so.
Neither top ('M') or xrestop shows anything unusual.

I had MDK 10.0 installed for a month or so and didn't see this afaic remember.

- Peder

yah thats exactly how it is for me, it just keeps on increasing steadily for no real reason, btw my swap seems to be never used, not sure if thats nromal

Doesn't this topic come up a least once a week?

To summarize: This is normal behavior. Linux will (eventually) use almost all your available RAM for caching. When a prog needs RAM it'll be freed. Since disk I/O is typically the bottleneck on most PCs, this behavior improves overall performance.

As I said: in my case it's not buffers and/or cache that's eating RAM, it's something else.

Once I've got the damned NVIDIA driver working with 2.6.10 (nevermind) [or I'll eventually give up] I'll see if
2.6.10 makes any difference.

- Peder

Well, my reply was to Palamides, but since you chastized me, I'd say your problem is a leaky cron job that runs aprox once a week... like updatedb (which did exact same to me on 9.2)

is it normal though that once it eats up all my ram, it takes forever to load anything, even just to open a folder?

This morning I hit > 500MB used with only 8M cached (I've got 512MB installed). Top didn't show any anomalies, it looked
just like after a reboot when I've got like 200MB used and 80MB cache. Exiting X didn't release any memory so I had to reboot.

I'm starting to suspect xscreensaver. I'm running mirrorblob, GLEidescope and XAnalogTV and have them configured to
use images from a directory of mine. My guess is, since some but quite few seems to be affected by this, xscreensaver
leaks memory when handling images. I have disabled that now to see if things get better.

Anyone else with the same problem and similar setup?

- Peder