swap space "problem"

ranmakun · Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2003 5:34 pm Post subject: swap space "problem"

well, I'm not sure if this is ok or not, but it doesn't look ok.
I upgraded my machine to 768 Mb of RAM but my Gentoo is still using a lot of swapspace.

dol-sen · Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2003 6:16 pm Post subject:

Are you using an nvidia video card with NVidias drivers? They are known for memory leaks. The latest kernels have are supposed to be patched to prevent it. What services are you running on this system? Once you use some memory for an app the kernel tends to keep it tagged as used, but will re-use it as needed apparently.

Brian

Malakin · Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2003 7:12 pm Post subject:

used ram - cache = 172 megs which doesn't seem too bad and it's only using a small bit of your swap space. My system has 512M ram, is using 226M after cache and using 12M of swap. I'd ignore it unless your swap starts to fill up.

Jimbow · Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2003 7:18 pm Post subject:

Some ideas:

1. Do a "ps aux| less" or gtop (in Gnome) or Ctrl-Esc (in KDE) to get a list of all processes. There may be a bunch of applications that did not close properly. I had this problem once when I was playing around with mplayer.

2. You may have some sort of memory leak. There is a known leak associated with the Nvidia drivers and GLX applications (like some of the nifty screensavers). You can check for this by trying out various GLX screensavers while monitoring your memory usage. Be careful though. If this is the cause and you are already out of RAM your disk may start thrashing forcing you to reboot.

3. If you do reboot, you may want to monitor your memory usage. I use Gkrellm for this. I think that Gtop or Ksysguard would also work. Worse comes to worse you could run top in a console. Then try to see if there is a correlation between using certain apps and memory usage.
_________________
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ranmakun · Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2003 6:32 pm Post subject:

ok, thank you guys, I discovered that was mldonkey that was doing this. If I turn on my computer and the first thing I do is to open mldonkey it starts to fill my cache progressively until all my ram is full and then it starts to fill my swap space.
What I dont undestand is why it doesn't use my ram instead of the swap space :roll:

This is the the free output after a test I did, only mldonkey open: