Re: memoryleak?

[Andrew Sharp <andy@netfall.com>]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 05:54:32PM +0300, Timo Aarnipuro wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I have xfree86 with gnome running on Ultrasparc 2 (4X300MHZ smp) 
> platform. The system appears to be leaking memory.
> 
> here's top:
> 
> top - 17:45:38 up  7:28,  4 users,  load average: 0.39, 0.20, 0.20
> Tasks:  99 total,   2 running,  97 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s):  2.0% us,  0.3% sy,  0.0% ni, 97.7% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
> Mem:   1034120k total,  1025920k used,     8200k free,   101160k buffers
> Swap:   543728k total,        0k used,   543728k free,   756184k cached
> 
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>  2674 root      15   0 30040  23m 7464 S  3.9  2.3  66:32.01 XFree86
>  3714 timo      16   0  2768 1408 1112 R  1.6  0.1   0:00.12 top
>  2998 timo      16   0 27528  14m  10m R  1.3  1.4  12:34.80 
> gnome-system-mo
>  2875 timo      15   0 30168  14m 9.8m S  1.0  1.4   1:48.58 gnome-terminal
>  2781 timo      16   0 12664 9560 2352 S  0.3  0.9   0:07.66 gconfd-2
>  2862 timo      16   0 23624  11m 9520 S  0.3  1.2   1:24.58 clock-applet
>     1 root      16   0  1792  712  624 S  0.0  0.1   0:07.33 init
> ... (rest of the processes take minimal amount of memory)
> 
> gnome system monitor also states that 99,2% of memory is used.

Well, yes, gnome is a pig ~:^)
But if you really had a leak, swap would be allocated.

However, perhaps you are used to seeing memory usage under Solaris,
which, by default uses server semantics for it's memory usage, whereas
Linux uses workstation semantics.  In other words, Linux takes the
attitude of 'why leave memory unused?'  Solaris takes the attitude of
'leave some memory for when the other 500 users need it.'  Of course,
Solaris can be configured/tuned to behave more like Linux, but you don't
see people doing that very often.

a