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Re: xfree86 is slowly consuming all of my memory



On Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 08:15:03AM -0500, Bryan K. Walton wrote:
> 	I have a box running Debian testing with a 2.4.18 kernel.  The
> box has 384MB of memory.  Right now, my memory is almost totally used
> up.  Here is a snapshot of the first few lines of top, sorting tasks by
> memory usage:
> 
>  08:09:04 up 2 days, 17:01,  3 users,  load average: 2.15, 2.05, 2.02
> 80 processes: 77 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
> CPU states:   0.8% user,   2.3% system,  96.9% nice,   0.0% idle
> Mem:    384756K total,   375588K used,     9168K free,    48768K buffers
> Swap:  1004020K total,      396K used,  1003624K free,    97380K cached

That indicates that you have almost 100Mb of memory that's just sitting
around being used to cache things (the "cached" figure), and that could
be thrown away and put to other uses if required. The Linux kernel will
use spare memory in this way under normal conditions.

>   PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
>  2561 root       5 -10  124M 107M  3956 S <   2.7 28.6   0:35 XFree86

Most of that will actually be device mappings, not physical memory, so
it's not anywhere near as bad as it looks. /proc/2561/maps will show
active device mappings, and http://web.hexapodia.org/~adi/pmap.c will
print that in a nicer format.

See:

  http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/xpert/2000-September/001331.html

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]



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