strange memory allocation
Hello,
I have been running slink with a 2.2.8 kernel on an LX system for
some time now. Unitl recently I have been dual booting between NT and
linux and everything seemed to be working fine. However, recently I have
had the machine running for about three weeks and I have noticed something
strange about the memory allocation. Whenever I first booted, a quick
glance at top revealed that the system was using about 40MB of ram.
However, as time went on, this number crept upward. Before I had just
assumed that memory was not reallocated until another process needed it,
which would explain why the amount of memory used increases over time.
However, since I have had the system up for some time, the amount of
memory used exceded the 256MB of ram that I have in the machine. A
glance at top recently revealed this:
Mem: 256720K av, 244176K used, 12544K free, 28200K shrd, 86584K buff
Swap: 523640K av, 8744K used, 514896K free 103216K cached
At this moment I was running nothing except several xterms, xwindows and a
few daemons which take very little use. The X server has by far the
largest memory requirement and it takes only 19MB of ram. Is there anyway
for me to find out what program is using memory so inefficently that I
have begun to use swap for day to day applications? This is most puzzling
to me, so any help would be very appreciated.
Luke Shulenburger
(sluke@mit.edu)
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