On 2011-03-08 14:37:23 Enrico Bertocchi wrote: >- Debian Squeeze, kernel 2.6.32-5-amd64, used in SOHO like environment >- huge amount of committed memory, e.g. from /proc/meminfo > Committed_AS: 369822496 kB > see Appendix 1 below; >- huge amounts of memory allocated by many processes, e.g. firefox-bin @ >120GB, see Appendix 2 below >- confirmed by huge [anon] lines in pmap, eg. > 00007fac3a1f7000 8388608K rw--- [ anon ] > see Appendix 3 below >- problem pretty widespread amongst the main open graphical applications >(evince, gvfs-fuse-daemon, gnome-keyring...) Based on the output you sent, I don't see a bug. Could you please provide more detail into what you expect vs. what you observe? Also, you should keep in mind that RAM not is use is RAM wasted. The kernel will attempt to use all of it so you shouldn't expect much free RAM in a running system. Your output indicated a lot of 'Cached' memory. 'Cached' memory is effectively free, if needed the kernel can quickly repurpose those pages of memory since they are just cache. You can't prevent the kernel from growing 'Buffers' and 'Cache'. (Buffers are another type of almost-free memory.) However, you can encourage the kernel to always get rid of buffers/cache before swapping by setting vm.swapiness to 0. I run with it set at 1; there are a number of practical situations where swapping out some application memory provides significant increase in throughput over dropping buffer/cache so I don't want to completely forbid the kernel from doing that. I agree that the default vm.swapiness of 60 is rather high. >It's the machine I'm writing from, and everything seems to work unless I >change the VM parameter overcommit_memory to 2, which causes any new process >to fail its mallocs due to excessive overcommit. I run with overcommit_memory set to 2 all the time. I suggest you set it from /etc/sysctl.conf; the system is less likely be happy with it changing after it has satisfied some allocations. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/
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