On 10/20/2015 11:33 PM, Jörg-Volker Peetz wrote:
Don Armstrong had also suggested checking the cache and buffers, which I had forgotten to do when I restarted. I checked them yesterday and, yes, that is where most of the memory was going after I had exited all X sessions. Google was my friend and showed me how to free up that memory ('free && sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && free' as root) and all is now good with the world.Marc Shapiro wrote on 10/21/2015 06:52: <snip>Something is not freeing up memory. It may, or may not be Firefox, but... I can exit all programs and all instances of X, leaving only a single console running. Top will show itself and bash, nothing else, but free can show over 2GB used. If I then reboot, free will show only about 250 MB used. Obviously something was tying up nearly 2 GB and it took a reboot to free it up. MarcWhich version of free you are using? Where does it show 2 GB? Do the 2 GB comprise buffered and cached data? Please, show the the output of free.
Thanks, everyone, for the help. If I had just looked more closely at the output of 'free' I could have done this myself. (Forehead slap).
Marc