Re: Amount of free mem decreasing..

From: André Gulliksen (andre.gulliksen_at_start.no)
Date: 12/30/04 

Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 10:17:58 +0100

nntp wrote:
> it started graphing at about 800M of free memory. Gradually (and
> pretty evenly) it has been decreasing. After about 1 1/2 to 2 weeks I
> am currently at 365M free. I don't know of anything that would be
> doing this.. I didn't really install all my apps yet, just the basics.

Most likely you have memory that is used but not freed, simply because your
system still has plenty of memory to spare. Recently accessed data and
programs are stilled stored in memory for speedy retrieval if they should be
required again.

You may want to monitor 'top' and 'ps -aux' for processes eating a lot of
memory, or processes respawning wildly. But unless you find anything I would
settle for the explanation above, and not worry again until you start
experiencing heavy page usage.

You may also want to read 'man top', especially the section called
"Description of memory".

> I dont' see any zombie processes.. Any ideas what could be causing
> this? Is there a command I can run to free unused memory?

If you do not want your memory to be used, remove it from your computer.
Seriously. As far as the computer is concerned, unused memory is wasted
memory, and if your computer finds the slightest use for it (such as storing
a program that you may or may not want to use again) it will. Forcing the
computer to release cached memory will give you a nicer looking free memory
figure, but it will also most likely reduce overall performance.

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