Re: memory leaks

[matt zagrabelny <z@saturnsys.com>]

On Mon, 2003-06-23 at 15:44, Nathan Poznick wrote:
> Thus spake matt zagrabelny:
> > hi,
> > 
> > after boot my system runs out of memory in ~36-48 hours.
> > 
> > i have rebooted my machine and let it sit there, only logging into a
> > virtual console to run top. it still runs out of memory with no other
> > "user" applications running than top.
> 
> What do you mean by 'runs out of memory'?  Do you get messages from the
> OOM killer as it slays processes in an attempt to free memory?  If not,
> I would submit that you are not running out of memory.  Linux will use
> all available free memory for cache and buffers, but this does not mean
> that it is "out of memory", since the memory used by cache and buffers
> can (and will) be reclaimed by the kernel as it is needed.

yes, processes are routinely killed to free memory.

but never-the-less, why would memory keep being allocated after boot? i
would think that total allocated would stabalize somewhat.

-matt