On Sunday, November 14, 2010 16:52:54 Marko Vojinovic wrote:
On Saturday, November 13, 2010 05:01:36 Garry T. Williams wrote:
On Friday, November 12, 2010 17:43:56 Marko Vojinovic wrote:
On Friday, November 12, 2010 22:14:34 you wrote:
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@gmail.com wrote:
I traced the issue down to swap usage --- after a couple of days of running, *something* seems to gradually fill the memory with junk
Mem: 2048088k total, 1657424k used, 390664k free, 18640k buffers Swap: 4192956k total, 1038432k used, 3154524k free, 566580k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2528 vmarko 20 0 2029m 171m 19m S 1.3 8.6 564:19.55 firefox 2397 vmarko 20 0 366m 148m 7460 S 1.3 7.4 230:40.39 skype 2366 vmarko 20 0 565m 92m 3044 S 0.0 4.6 12:10.68 emerald 5723 vmarko 20 0 989m 82m 17m S 0.0 4.1 10:29.49 kmail 1739 root 20 0 471m 59m 11m S 19.9 3.0 3780:01 X 2021 vmarko 20 0 1380m 57m 9476 S 6.3 2.9 780:37.22 ktorrent 2016 vmarko 20 0 293m 42m 8176 S 0.7 2.1 137:01.00 skype 2222 vmarko 20 0 789m 28m 5436 S 0.0 1.4 11:05.85 cairo-dock 1998 vmarko 20 0 937m 20m 8824 S 4.3 1.0 804:03.95 plasma-desktop 2603 vmarko 20 0 546m 18m 7088 S 0.0 0.9 1:39.64 kile 22635 vmarko 20 0 480m 12m 6452 S 0.7 0.6 43:06.53 konsole 2053 vmarko 9 -11 501m 12m 11m S 0.3 0.6 259:54.25 pulseaudio 10764 vmarko 20 0 455m 8572 4608 S 0.0 0.4 1:07.09 okular 32679 vmarko 20 0 285m 8528 5616 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.11 kio_pop3
[snip]
It is clear from above that the 2 GB memory on this machine is over- committed. Add more RAM.
Well, it doesn't seem to be overcommitted for the first four days of running, with all those apps. Apparently there is a process among these which uses more and more memory as time passes, without bound, and eventually forces everything else to swap. So adding more RAM is not the solution, it would just postpone using of swap for another week maybe.
Maybe not. It looks like another Gig would do it.
My money is on ktorrent. It's filling up the cached memory, I bet. That stuff is probably also being used as peers request blocks from your client. The system gradually pages out pages from other applications to make room for ktorrent pages in cached memory. Eventually you use one of those apps and it page faults a bunch of its memory back in before it can respond.
You might try clearing the cache. From a root prompt, type:
sync; echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
Or maybe stop running ktorrent altogether to see if that helps.
Stopping and restarting firefox on a regular basis will help, too.