Arch Linux

riwa

Member

From: Lund, Sweden

Registered: 2006-04-04

Posts: 215

Problem with memory leak.

I noticed that I all my memory gets used up very quickly. I recently rebooted and found that I have about 32 of my 480 memory used up but as soon as I start X I use up about 440 mb. I've tried several wm's but there's no improvement. Anyone know some way of determining the cause?

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If you must have must. Have must.
- DKE supporters about this wonderful swedish soda.

jaboua

Member

Registered: 2005-11-05

Posts: 634

Re: Problem with memory leak.

I noticed that I all my memory gets used up very quickly. I recently rebooted and found that I have about 32 of my 480 memory used up but as soon as I start X I use up about 440 mb. I've tried several wm's but there's no improvement. Anyone know some way of determining the cause?

Cache?

Use "free" to see what of it is cache/user memory/buffers/free

phrakture

Arch Overlord

From: behind you

Registered: 2003-10-29

Posts: 7,879

Website

Re: Problem with memory leak.

I noticed that I all my memory gets used up very quickly. I recently rebooted and found that I have about 32 of my 480 memory used up but as soon as I start X I use up about 440 mb. I've tried several wm's but there's no improvement. Anyone know some way of determining the cause?

Are there any actual problems, or is this just cosmetic?  Is your system sluggish at all?

Contrary to popular belief, you want your RAM to be used - it is not hard drive space, it is renewable.  If you're not using it, then you wasted money buying it.

Let's look at the output from 'free -m':

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3979       3857        122          0          9       2120
-/+ buffers/cache:       1727       2251
Swap:         6165        550       5615

Oh no, this shows only 122MB out of 4GB are free!  No.  Wrong.  That's not bad.  Note the second line.  1700 MB are taken by "buffers/cache" - this is where extra data is stored temporarilly so that your hardware doesn't need to hit the hard drive (which is about 100 times slower than RAM access) every time.  If you look at the "free" column under the "buffers/cache" section, you can see that almost 2300 MB of RAM are really free, but the difference between that and the 122 are filled with buffered information.

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riwa

Member

From: Lund, Sweden

Registered: 2006-04-04

Posts: 215

Re: Problem with memory leak.

Yes. The system is extremely sluggish (with ion3!) and when I posted I had very little cache. I noticed that it's much better now (most of the memory is cached) but I find it very strange to find all my mem used up as soon as I start X after a reboot.

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If you must have must. Have must.
- DKE supporters about this wonderful swedish soda.