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
Run top and type "M". That will sort process by their resident memory usage. It won't had to spot the offender.
[snip]
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
So what do you make of it?
These top processes are, together, allocated over 10 GB of virtual address space. On a 2 GB physical memory machine, you are almost certainly going to page. Also firefox with flash has been known to consume memory without bound. Some Web sites are designed poorly to cause Javascript to consume memory without bound.
It is clear from above that the 2 GB memory on this machine is over- committed. Add more RAM.
On Friday, November 12, 2010 17:52:12 Patrick Boutilier wrote:
You have almost 400M free and almost 600M cached. Not sure why so much goes into swap. What are the results of the free command after running this command?
swapoff -a && swapon -a
Do not do this. The processes above will *not* fit in 2 GB.
Also the size of cached is almost certainly coming from ktorrent, judging from the CPU time it has accumulated. The file data it reads from the network is being held around in anticipation of it being useful soon. It probably isn't. Cached will be reclaimed when needed by a process.
On Friday, November 12, 2010 20:10:18 Rex Dieter wrote:
Looks like the top 3 aren't kde applications. Try quiting/restarting these?
Yup.