Memory leaks in Red Hat 8.0

[retoon]

Is it just my imagination, or is there a memory leak in Red Hat linux 8.0. I have posted on this before, and am now truly serious about doing away with this problem. I have a gigabyte of ram. Thats plenty of ram, and I would assume that there would be no problem doing the things that I do which aren't much. I use my pc for open office, the gimp, surfing the web, and altogether familiarizing myself with linux for it is the wave of the future. Its no much, and I don't see why in about 3 hours of use, I have already taken up about 486 megabytes of ram. And by the end of the day, there is so little ram left that I have to make use of my swap file. Would anyone happen to know if there are any applications that are running in the background that might be doing this? It happens no matter which window manager I use. Some one once told me that it is linux's nature to do this, and that when I go to run an application, it takes what it needs. I tried running tux racer while 986 megabytes of ram were taken up, and it ran so slowly that I could barely exit it. So that shouldn't be typical linux behavior. If anyone is able to shed some light on this, I would appreciate it greatly. I promise that anything I learn I will pass on to other users. My sig has my system specs.

[Fryguy8]

How much did you pay for that 1 gig of ram?

Now, would you rather have that $200 (estimate) worth of ram just sit there doing nothing, or would you rather have your operating system use it for disk caching?

The RAM is being used to make disk writes faster.

Type 'cat /proc/meminfo' and you'll see a more detailed list of what all of your ram is being used for. As you'll see, a very small percentage of it will actually be "active"

[retoon]

total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 1055780864 589983744 465797120 0 60256256 301506560
Swap: 2089209856 0 2089209856
MemTotal: 1031036 kB
MemFree: 454880 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Buffers: 58844 kB
Cached: 294440 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 460288 kB
Inact_dirty: 25744 kB
Inact_clean: 38300 kB
Inact_target: 104864 kB
HighTotal: 131008 kB
HighFree: 1024 kB
LowTotal: 900028 kB
LowFree: 453856 kB
SwapTotal: 2040244 kB
SwapFree: 2040244 kB
Committed_AS: 263920 kB

460 megabytes are active. Not the case, but thank you for replying. Any other suggestions?

[GaryJones32]

well linux uses all memory basically
you wouldn't want unused memory
but if it's getting into the swap that's not too good
and if over time the processes are eating up more and more that's no good.
try in addition to /proc/meminfo

ps -el | sort -r +9 | head

the SZ collum gives mem usage of each pid over time
if those are growing and growing that is a problem...

Of course there is some memory leak i bet in very small amounts.
nobodys perfect but that's not your problem..

you just have that redhat performance mystery thing.

I think it's kernel bloat and x bloat myself
but i don't know what i'm talking about as usual :)

see if you can slim the kernel and take away the font server
and make sure no daemons like cron are running and like that

[retoon]

I tried something recently. I ran the system monitor while running other applications. Example, I was at 274 MB usage of ram, and ran the gimp, it kicked me up to 298 MB ram usage. Then I closed the application, it left me at 286 mb of ram. I left it alone for about 20 minutes thinking that there was a default timer that would keep an application in ram until a certain period of time, it was still at 286. Any comments on that?

[hlrguy]

Originally posted by retoon
Then I closed the application, it left me at 286 mb of ram. I left it alone for about 20 minutes thinking that there was a default timer that would keep an application in ram until a certain period of time, it was still at 286. Any comments on that?

Your box is working perfectly. Why clean it out after an arbitrary period of time, You might start the GIMP at 21 minutes later. It would then reactivate the GIMP preloaded memory. If another application started, and needed to use that memory, it would. I have been up for 3 weeks now, 248 of 256 in use, and only Mozilla is running. If, however, I click on OpenOffice, I was using it Friday, cool, still in memory, 1 SECOND load. (Might have been 2 seconds) :)

hlrguy

[retoon]

The problem is that other applications won't take away from my available ram, and will work very slowly.