Oh Bugger, part 3: Memory leaks suck

[unixronin]

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....

Comments

[attutle.livejournal.com]

Sorry if I pissed you off.

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.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sorry I went off on you a bit. But frankly, I found it insulting that you assumed that I hadn't done even trivial troubleshooting of userspace apps as obvious as a web browser simply because I hadn't posted my full troubleshooting process.