[Leaplist] Memory leaks under FC6 ....

[William A. Mahaffey III]

Kyle Gonzales wrote:
> William,
>
> What exactly is using the memory?  Run top and sort by memory usage
> (done by pressing 'M' in top).  That should tell you what processes
> are eating memory.  Do you run Firefox?  If so, do you regularly keep
> it open?  It can eat alot of memory with caching.
>
> On Nov 11, 2007 8:15 AM, William A. Mahaffey III <wam at hiwaay.net> wrote:
>   
>> .... I have an AMD64X2 box running FC6 x86_64, mostly stock (stock
>> kernel, 2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 straight off the DVD), running XFCE desktop,
>> originally chosen for its small memory footprint. The box has been up 81
>> days & I have been logged in most of that time. When I do a 'free -m', I
>> see:
>>
>> [wam at AthlonCube, ~, 7:04:20am] 731 % free -m
>>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
>> Mem:          1943       1897         45          0         17        359
>> -/+ buffers/cache:       1520        422
>> Swap:         1983          1       1982
>> [wam at AthlonCube, ~, 7:06:48am] 732 %
>>
>> or about 3/4 of the 2GB of onboard RAM taken :-). I have 4 desktops open
>> and about a dozen rxvt (1) terminals open total, & that's it. This seems
>> a bit excessive. I googled 'memory leak XFCE desktop' & found a few
>> mentions, but most were dated 2004-ish or earlier & all mentioned RAM
>> use growing at a few hundred KB / (hour|day), i.e. far faster than I am
>> observing. They were also all (1st page or 2) for Debian or Ubuntu. Are
>> there any known memory-leak problems w/ either XFCE *and* FC6, or FC6 in
>> general ? TIA ....
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>>         William A. Mahaffey III
>>
>>  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>         "The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
>>          ever devised by man."
>>                            -- Gen. George S. Patton Jr.
>>     

OK, here goes:

top - 23:47:06 up 82 days,  8:04,  0 users,  load average: 0.11, 0.06, 0.01
Tasks: 182 total,   1 running, 174 sleeping,   0 stopped,   7 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.2%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.7%id,  0.0%wa,  0.2%hi,  0.0%si,  
0.0%st
Mem:   1989992k total,  1944868k used,    45124k free,    98060k buffers
Swap:  2031608k total,     1852k used,  2029756k free,   283480k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  
COMMAND                                                        
 9310 wam       15   0 1723m 575m  10m S    0 29.6 155:54.31 
xfdesktop                                                       
 9320 wam       15   0  739m 575m 8584 S    0 29.6 143:54.67 
xfce4-menu-plug                                                 
 9222 root      15   0  204m  52m 9716 S    0  2.7 101:48.82 
Xorg                                                            
 6247 wam       15   0 6132m  42m  20m S    0  2.2   0:02.25 
thunderbird-bin                                                 
19441 wam       15   0 2282m  25m  14m S    0  1.3   0:13.73 
ekiga                                                           
 9312 wam       15   0 2181m  24m  13m S    0  1.3   0:49.41 
Thunar                                                          
 9314 wam       15   0  208m  15m 9944 S    0  0.8   2:08.24 
xfce4-panel                                                     
 1724 root      15   0 22364  12m  452 S    0  0.6   0:00.25 
restorecond                                                     
 9308 wam       15   0  217m  12m 6696 S    0  0.6   0:18.17 
xfce-mcs-manage                                                 
 9309 wam       15   0  119m  11m 6520 S    0  0.6   0:44.67 
xfwm4                                                           
 9305 wam       15   0  175m  11m 8080 S    0  0.6   0:20.33 
xfce4-session                                                   
10729 wam       15   0 2214m  10m 8844 S    0  0.6   0:00.29 
evolution-alarm                                                 
10723 wam       15   0 2159m 8088 5472 S    0  0.4   0:00.16 
evolution-data-                                                 
19219 root      23   0  102m 5416 1048 S    0  0.3   0:05.81 automount


You can see thunderbird open, but xfdesktop et al top the list. I don't 
keep Firefox or thunderbird eternally open, but I do stay logged on for 
long periods (weeks) ....


-- 

	William A. Mahaffey III

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------

	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
	 ever devised by man."
                           -- Gen. George S. Patton Jr.