Re: memory leak?

[Måns Rullgård]

Andrew Rodland <[e-mail]> writes:

> On 21 Jul 2002 16:00:09 +0200
> [e-mail] (M) wrote:
> 
> > 
> > I noticed that doing lots or file accesses causes the used memory to
> > increase, *after* subtracting buffers/cache. Here is an example:
> > 
> > $ free
> >              total       used       free     shared    buffers    
> >              cached
> > Mem:        773776      30024     743752          0       1992     
> > 10424-/+ buffers/cache:      17608     756168
> > Swap:        81904          0      81904
> > $ du > /dev/null
> > $ free
> >              total       used       free     shared    buffers    
> >              cached
> > Mem:        773776      78008     695768          0      26328     
> > 10472-/+ buffers/cache:      41208     732568
> > Swap:        81904          0      81904
> > 
> > Here 24 MB of memory have been used up. Repeating the du seems to have
> > little effect. This directory has ~3200 subdirs and 13400 files.
> > 
> > After a few hours use about 200 MB are used, apperently for
> > nothing. Killing all processed and unmounting file systems doesn't
> > help.
> > 
> > Is this a memory leak? I get the same results with ext2, ext3,
> > reiserfs and nfs.
> 
> wow!
> I've been seeing this, too, but I thought I was just reading something
> wrong. Especially after my nightly cron jobs (which involve a 'find
> /') run, I'll often find myself with 80% of physical RAM used, and
> nobody (as far as 'top' can see) using it. You didn't specify which
> kernel you're using, but I'm running 2.4.19-rc1-ac1 plus some patches,
> and I've seen it since at least about pre9-ac*. I might try to narrow it
> down more if it could be useful.

I forgot to mention the kernel version. It's 2.4.19-rc3. It's been
going on a while, though, before I took the time start looking for it.

-- 
Måns Rullgård
[e-mail]