something's eating memory and i don't know what

**trancephorm** · 03-11-2005

I'm using Slackware 10 (kernel 2.4.26), and the amount of free RAM is getting lower and lower, constantly, in a steps of just a few kilobytes, but I installed the system with only basic services, as I need it just for very busy web server...

You may see a screenshot of a top utility after 16 minutes at i.vizio.biz/linux-top-2.gif, and after 2hr52min at this address: i.vizio.biz/linux-top-2.gif

The CPU is Intel Pentium 1 MMX 200 Mhz, RAM is SDRAM 256 MB...

Is it normal behaviour (I believe it is maybe a disk cache?), or is it an error?

Please help,
Marko

**Flatline** · 03-11-2005

Sounds like pretty normal behavior. Linux uses as much of your RAM as it can in an attempt to make performance better.

**milicic.marko** · 03-18-2005

Linux is using RAM memorz for buffering hard disk data. That makes linux so fast.

PS.
Empty memory is useless memory, but ocupied memorz is USED

Ciao!

**shalamabobbi** · 03-18-2005

Linux uses as much of your RAM as it can in an attempt to make performance better.

That's why Linux is so fast on my PC, I have two Gigs of RAM, something XP never took much advantage of.. sweet..

**puntmuts** · 03-19-2005

free -m will give you a summary of your memory usage, with a line for memory used by buffers and cache. It looks like this:

Code:

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem&#58;           502        493          9          0         84        202
-/+ buffers/cache&#58;        206        296
Swap&#58;         1952          0       1952

The last number in the -/+ buffers/cache: line is the amount of free memory without buffers and cache. If that is sort of constant on an idle system there is no memory leak.

I couldn't help seeing your search on google about auto unloading unused kernel modules. Slackware takes care of that using a cronjob by default.

To get a full list of processes you could use the command ps aux. top will give a partial list by default .

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