[plug] Possible problem with memory leaks

[Brad Campbell]

Bret Busby wrote:
> 
> Output of free:
> 
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:        762936     575960     186976          0      59240     323376
> -/+ buffers/cache:     193344     569592
> Swap:      1052216          0    1052216
> 

So you are actually using about 193M out of 768. Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
You have 323M Cached and 59M Buffers. If the system really needs the memory it will dump cache. You 
have 186M completely free. No problem.

Here are a couple of outputs from my machines for comparison. You can see my laptop has 20M free, 
but 570M cached. If it needs the memory back it will just reclaim it by dumping cache.

bklaptop:~>free -m
              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1009        988         20          0         51        570
-/+ buffers/cache:        366        642
Swap:          980        477        502

brad at tv:~$ free -m
              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1515       1480         35          0          0       1104
-/+ buffers/cache:        375       1140
Swap:            0          0          0

brad at srv:~$ free -m
              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1518       1405        112          0         61        995
-/+ buffers/cache:        348       1169
Swap:          964         26        938

Here are the major memory consumers on bklaptop as reported by top sorted by memory.

  1513 brad      19   0  181m 130m  24m S  2.0 13.0  16:29.33 thunderbird-bin
  1515 brad       8   0  181m 130m  24m S  0.0 13.0   0:00.03 thunderbird-bin
  1516 brad       9   0  181m 130m  24m S  0.0 13.0   0:00.99 thunderbird-bin
  1518 brad       9   0  181m 130m  24m S  0.0 13.0   0:02.35 thunderbird-bin
  2566 brad      10   0 90552  81m  16m S  0.3  8.1  14:33.48 firefox-bin
  2568 brad       8   0 90552  81m  16m S  0.0  8.1   0:00.00 firefox-bin
  2569 brad       9   0 90552  81m  16m S  0.0  8.1   0:04.46 firefox-bin
  2571 brad       9   0 90552  81m  16m S  0.0  8.1   0:06.05 firefox-bin
  3280 brad       8   0 90552  81m  16m S  0.0  8.1   0:00.00 firefox-bin
  7807 brad       8   0 42128  41m  964 S  0.0  4.1   0:09.14 bk
  5157 brad       8   0 42116  41m  964 S  0.0  4.1   0:12.77 bk
  1480 root       9 -10 69540  30m 9636 S  0.7  3.0  29:58.28 XFree86
  3995 brad       9   0 20016  19m  19m S  0.0  1.9   1:37.89 dosexec
  3997 brad       9   0 20428  12m  11m S  0.0  1.2   0:09.72 xcrt
  3796 brad       9   0 11632  11m  11m S  0.0  1.1   0:06.89 dosexec
  7674 brad       9   0 11304  11m 3440 S  0.0  1.1   0:04.48 wish

Your system looks fine.
HTH.
Brad
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