[KLUG Members] Memory dump?

[Adam Williams]

> > > I have the same issue
> > > I am running RH9 with the KDE desktop I have 368mg of RAM and I run KDE
> > > system gaurd to monitor the system and the memory just keeps increasing
> > > like thier is a leak or that it is not being released back to the system
> > "free" memory will eventually decline to zero; this is normal healthy
> > system behaviour.  Only paging activity indicates memory exhaustion.
> > > after a program is closed it gets to the point were programs wont even
> > > open anymore and I have to reboot this usually takes about 8 days 
> > Do you log out and back in, or is this one continual session?
> I am new to Linux please what is paging activity?

Moving pages of memory (usually allocated and managed in 4Kb "pages")
between physical memory (RAM) and virtual memory (Swap partition(s)).

And even just swapping isn't neccesarily bad.  For instance:
[awilliam@estate2 tmp]$ vmstat 20 20
   procs                      memory      swap          io    
system      cpu
 r  b  w   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs 
 2  0  0     12  30072 207264 325112    0    0     8    51  147   681 
 1  0  0     56  30176 207272 325524    0    8    18   242  162  4646
 4  0  0     72  29824 207280 325648    0    7     0    89  137  471
 0  0  0    100  29344 207280 325836    0    7     3   100  135  4605 
 3  0  0    160  28552 207280 326200    0   15    16   119  136  4584 
 2  0  0    372  22076 207344 320336    0   21     3   207  137  4644
 3  0  0    444  26560 207356 320736    0    5     0   248  130  4273
 3  0  0    524  25076 207356 319980    0   18     0   231  133  4233
 1  0  0    596  36228 207364 322488    0    4     0   222  138  4790
 1  0  0    660  32956 207364 325200    0    3     0   231  138  4843
 1  0  0    708  32032 207368 327640    0    2     0   239  140  4607
 3  0  0    724  28908 207372 330576    0    1     0   241  147  4596
 4  0  0    724  34516 207372 332988    0    0     0   228  137  4346
 3  0  0    724  35604 207384 335960    0    0     0   240  138  4825
 4  0  0    724  23716 207384 337056    0    0     2   231  733  5851
 3  0  0    728  26116 206912 339076    0    0     8   189  779  5364
 5  0  0    728  38804 206908 340388    0    0     0   202  831  4591

"si" and "so" are swap-in/swap-out respectively.  Free memory may be
declining and the system is swapping out, but it is never asking for
those pages again (swap-in) so they where probably just extra stuff
anyway and the system is using the physical RAM for more pressing
things.

[awilliam@estate2 tmp]$ free -t
             total       used       free  shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1013640     979924      33716       0     205512     365660
-/+ buffers/cache:     408752     604888
Swap:       522104        680     521424
Total:     1535744     980604     555140
[awilliam@estate2 tmp]$ uptime
 08:10:26  up 14:18,  1 user,  load average: 2.15, 1.93, 1.28

So out of 1Gb of RAM I've only got 33Mb "free", after running only 14
hours. By the end of the day that 33 will be even lower.  But that is a
good thing.  What good does "free" RAM do for you?  Nothing.

There are really only two critical factors here.

(1) +/- buffers used number is a healthy percentage of my RAM [Good
thing].
(2) Swap utilization is low;  less than 20% of physical RAM is a rough
benchmark for goodness.  If swap utilization climbs up above 50% of
physical RAM you probably need more RAM than what you have. [This is a
rough benchmark, some types applications drive up swap utilization and
are special cases where higher numbers are still fine].

To be rather blunt, most GUI system monitoring tools focus on entirely
the wrong things, and feel like they were written by people from a Win9x
background.

gtop is OK, if you know how to read it.

Since your bleeding of memory is taking a really long time it might be
hard to spot,  but it should be easy to tell if it is a single process
by using something like top/gtop and sorting my memory (press shift-m in
top).

It might not by memory related at all; you could be running out of file
descriptors or something similiar.  Are RH Update or NSCD enabled? 
These have both been culprits of that in the past.

> Logging out and back in.

Ok.