Hi, I’m running Slackware 9 with 2.4.21 kernel on a machine with a 300Mhz Celeron CPU and 256mb RAM. I noticed recently that after booting up RAM utilisation is pretty low (around 25mb) but slowly this builds until its nearly all used and then starts to use the swap partition. This takes a few hours and happens even if its not being used and is just standing idle. I was wondering whether this was normal or if I had a ‘memory leak’ somewhere (I don’t really know what these are but have heard they can occur)?

Any ideas would be greatly received as its been bugging me for ages! Thanks.

well most of your memory gets cached and alot is not really being used ....
like when i look at my mem stats it says i have 556/628 used...with only 71 free..but if you go to the prompt and type:
free -m
you get a better printout and when i look closer it says this...
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 628 556 71 0 87 257
-/+ buffers/cache: 211 416
Swap: 1278 24 1254

which now i see there is actually 416 free and only 211 used, and the rest is cached....so technically its not all being used for running what your running.