I appear to have just confirmed I have a kernel memory leak on this machine.
Before reboot: 496M of physical RAM out of 512M in use for processes, 300M of swap out of 512M used, total of around 850M of RAM usage and only 50M of it buffers and cache. After reboot: 295M of physical RAM used for processes, 210M used for buffers and cache, zero swap used. Same processes running, same number of browser windows open to the same pages, same four processes are the top memory users, they're still the only ones using over 1M of RAM, and they're using about the same amount as they were before rebooting.
So somewhere, the kernel had leaked half a gig of RAM....
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And yeah, one would hope there were not bad memory leaks all over, but it wouldn't be the first time the Linux kernel has had a memory leak.
Then again, I DID have to update some Gnome2 libraries a while back to support the latest Firefox releases, and I cannot honestly claim Gnome is my favorite piece of software. So you might well be onto something there.
Any diagnostic suggestions for library leaks?
(Frankly, this whole box is overdue for a total OS reinstall with a more current version. I suspect that'll clean up a LOT of assorted cruft.)
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Your best bet to rule the kernel out is going to be dropping to single user mode.
You might even do a full lsof before/after and compare those if you want more detail.
It could be a kernel module, but even that isn't nearly as likely as having a problem in something else.
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