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.
Ok, sure, I've been advised to do this before, and I've done it many times, but somehow I'm not any smarter after looking at top output. Maybe I am reading it wrong, but it just confuses me even further. Here goes, sorted by memory usage:
top - 22:16:38 up 10 days, 5:11, 5 users, load average: 0.38, 0.45, 0.37 Tasks: 200 total, 1 running, 199 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 10.4%us, 8.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 79.9%id, 1.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st 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?
First 14 processes take up (together) 37.4 %MEM. Except for the last one (I have no idea what is kio_pop3), all of those are active simultaneously on my desktop most of the time.
I have 2 GB of RAM and 4GB of swap, and apparently most of the RAM is used up and an extra 1 GB of swap. So what apps are using up the remaining 62.6 %MEM?
Is there a way to list all processes, sorted by memory usage? Top truncates the output to the height of the terminal, and I would really like to see if the %MEM is actually summed up to 100 for all processes.
By the way, does MEM column refer to RAM or RAM+swap? In any case, I don't see why my 10+ apps, using a total of 37% of memory can force the system to use 1GB of swap, on top of 2GB RAM.
Is there a way to check which pages (belonging to which apps) are being swapped out? Furthermore, is there a way to understand why is this being done? What is occupying all that RAM if Firefox and KMail are routinely swapped out and thus behave in an extremely sluggish way until they finally get focus (and get swapped back to RAM)?
I guess it should be a sane system policy that apps currently open on the desktop not be swapped, unless there is no more RAM for all of them. But all my desktop apps take up only 37% of that RAM, so why do they get swapped out in the first place?
I'd appreciate any clarification on this matter.
Best, :-) Marko