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utvikl

Member

Registered: 2011-07-07

Posts: 21

Memory leak with virtualbox

Hi

I have noticed a memory leak on my system related to virtualbox as it's the only software I run on the machine. Problem is that this memory leak doesn't seem to be related to user space, as ps doesn't report the memory used and when I kill the virtualbox process, the memory is still reported as in use with the free command. Is it possible to investigate where this memory is allocated further? I suspect there is a leak in one of the kernel drivers. is it possible to investigate the memory used by the kernel modules further?

Thanks.

ayekat

Member

Registered: 2011-01-17

Posts: 1,632

Re: Memory leak with virtualbox

Hi, could you please post the output of

free -m

both when you start VirtualBox and when it start leaking? It's just to be sure that it isn't only a misunderstood buffer/cache thing.

Last edited by ayekat (2016-02-10 09:15:50)

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pkgs │ hacks │ cfg │ blag

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,999

Website

Re: Memory leak with virtualbox

You can also use ps_mem to list the memory usage of individual programs.

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utvikl

Member

Registered: 2011-07-07

Posts: 21

Re: Memory leak with virtualbox

I ran virtualbox for a night and then I stopped it and flushed the cache. Then output looks like this:

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7.6G        3.6G        3.8G         70M        228M        3.8G
Swap:            0B          0B          0B

When I run ps_mem it reported 168MiB for all programs.

What doesn't make sense to me is why 3.6G is reported as still in use by free?