disappearing RAM!

[mudbone357]

I have 256 Mbs. of RAM in my SUsE 7.0 box, running 2.4.4, but as I run it I constantly am losing RAM in my memory settings. I end up having to restart my machine every two days to free up space. Does anyone know why that is, and/or how to fix it?

[Rastar]

MEMORY LEAK!!!! you must have a program running that is just sucking the life juice out of your ram. While I cannot tell you how to fix it I hope I have helped and would like to hear a way to fix it myself.

Ras :confused:

[Strike]

No, no, no. Open up a console and run this command:

free -m | grep s/c | awk '{print $4}'

That will tell you how much you are truly using.

[mudbone357]

hey,
So I ran what you said and the number it returned is 156. This seems to be consistent with the amount of RAM supposedly in my swap.
Even though this number is lower than I thought, the real problem seems to be that I start at boot up with about 156 free, but five minutes later, it's down to 25 or lower. What do you think?

[Strike]

That set of commands tells you how much RAM you aren't using in programs right NOW. If that number shrinks greatly (and continues to), then something is eating up memory. If it shrinks without you running any other programs, then something is gobbling up RAM (a memory leak).

So, try booting up, waiting for the system to settle, and then run that command. Wait like 30 more minutes (don't do anything on the system), and then run it again. If the number has changed greatly, then something is weird.