Memory Leak

[UncleChubbs]

Hi folks,
I'm new to the forum and rather green in regards to running Linux.

I have a server running a large health care application and it is consuming almost 65% of the memory on the box at any given time. I have killed the processes but still find there to be an undetermined ammount of memory not released after the process has been terminated.

Is there a command I can run to free up this missing memory?

Top command returns the following for Memory.
Mem: 8178932k total, 8129832k used, 49100k free, 90436k buffers
Swap: 15623172k total, 30756k used, 15592416k free, 7606656k cached

Thanks for any help you can provide.

-UC

[iwanabeguru]

Hi

When you start a program the linux load it to the memory and keep it in while the memory not needed by a another program.

[sixstringartist]

Memory management is not as straight forward as it may seem in linux. Im no expert, but from what I understand, a programs listed memory use includes necessary libraries to run that program. However closing that program may not release all memory associated with it because other programs may use those library files as well. Another thing to note is that if you add up the memory use of all programs, you may get an inflated value because the same libraries may be represented by multiple programs.