I've been noticing a greater difference between the outputs of free and ps with regard to my used memory and am really beginning to wonder what's going on...
Here's what's going on: I'm running 2.2.1 on an x86 box and as the system
has been chugging away the amount of free memory has been dwindling, even
though an output of ps aux reports a constant (and much lower) memory
usage. This box has 128mb's of ram, so ps aux's output (the sum of %mem *
~128) is only a few megs, while free says I'm using 100megs w/o cache and
such. How does this make sense? Fwiw this is an smp box, and it's been up
about 60 days now.
Here's the output of a ps aux and free that I just did:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]$ ps aux; free
USER PID %CPU %MEM SIZE RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
chris 2355 0.0 0.4 916 544 1 R 10:13 0:00 ps aux
chris 25971 0.0 0.5 2144 768 1 S Mar 26 0:00 -bash
daemon 116 0.0 0.0 788 0 ? SW Feb 2 0:08 (portmap)
daemon 289 0.0 0.0 840 0 ? SW Feb 2 0:06 (atd)
lp 155 0.0 0.2 1912 300 ? S Feb 2 6:12 lpd MAIN
postgres 174 0.0 0.0 3712 16 ? S Feb 2 0:01 (postmaster)
qmaill 183 0.0 0.0 752 0 ? SW Feb 2 1:03 (splogger)
qmailq 186 0.0 0.0 740 0 ? SW Feb 2 0:23 (qmail-clean)
qmailr 185 0.0 0.0 740 0 ? SW Feb 2 0:01 (qmail-rspawn)
qmails 178 0.0 0.0 792 0 ? SW Feb 2 4:09 (qmail-send)
root 1 0.0 0.0 756 64 ? S Feb 2 0:13 init
root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW Feb 2 5:56 (kflushd)
root 3 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW Feb 2 12:41 (kswapd)
root 12 0.0 0.0 720 28 ? S Feb 2 47:43 update
root 104 0.0 0.1 896 176 ? S Feb 2 28:43 /sbin/syslogd
root 106 0.0 0.0 804 0 ? SW Feb 2 0:02 (klogd)
root 118 0.0 0.0 864 84 ? S Feb 2 1:10 /usr/sbin/inetd
root 121 0.0 0.7 1928 960 ? S Feb 2 39:04 /usr/sbin/named
root 141 0.0 0.0 748 60 S0 S Feb 2 26:19 /usr/sbin/gpm
-m /dev/ttyS0 -t ms -l "a-zA-Z0-9_.:~/\300-\326\330-\366\37root 148
0.1 0.2 956 368 ? S Feb 2 80:55 /usr/sbin/tcplogd
root 150 0.0 0.0 860 0 ? SW Feb 2 2:59 (icmplogd)
root 184 0.0 0.0 740 0 ? SW Feb 2 1:04 (qmail-lspawn)
root 210 0.0 0.0 1340 0 ? SW Feb 2 2:11 (sshd)
root 233 0.1 0.0 1648 80 ? S Feb 2 89:46
/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd
root 235 0.0 0.0 1284 76 ? S Feb 2 43:39
/usr/sbin/rpc.mountd
root 292 0.0 0.1 860 168 ? S Feb 2 6:21 /usr/sbin/cron
root 310 0.0 0.0 836 0 5 SW Feb 2 0:00 (getty)
root 311 0.0 0.0 836 0 6 SW Feb 2 0:00 (getty)
root 341 0.0 0.2 1132 260 S1 S 05:00 0:04 /usr/sbin/pppd
call hiwaay
root 572 0.0 0.1 1692 248 ? S N Feb 2 12:04 rc5des
root 573 0.1 0.1 1692 248 ? S N Feb 2 84:41 rc5des
root 574 99.9 0.1 1692 248 ? R N Feb 2 67824:41 rc5des
root 575 99.9 0.1 1692 248 ? R N Feb 2 60237:51 rc5des
root 1483 0.2 0.7 992 992 ? S 06:48 0:36 /usr/sbin/xntpd
root 2677 0.0 0.0 836 0 4 SW Mar 20 0:00 (getty)
root 6453 0.0 0.0 868 36 ? S Mar 12 0:32 dynipclient -m
root 17963 0.0 0.2 1300 356 ? S Mar 23 3:09 /usr/sbin/nmbd
-D -a
root 17965 0.0 0.0 1272 0 ? SW Mar 23 0:00 (nmbd)
root 17968 0.0 0.0 1448 0 ? SW Mar 23 0:00 (smbd)
root 27649 0.0 0.0 836 0 3 SW Mar 26 0:00 (getty)
root 29494 0.0 0.1 1836 196 ? S Mar 27 0:26 /usr/sbin/smbd
-D
root 32059 0.0 0.0 836 0 2 SW 21:54 0:00 (getty)
root 32062 0.2 0.0 2604 60 ? S Feb 7 188:00
/usr/sbin/apache
www-data 956 0.0 0.0 2640 8 ? S 06:42 0:00 (apache)
www-data 1750 0.0 0.0 2736 8 ? S 07:49 0:00 (apache)
www-data 1751 0.0 0.0 2628 8 ? S 07:49 0:00 (apache)
www-data 1752 0.0 0.0 2728 8 ? S 07:49 0:00 (apache)
www-data 1753 0.0 0.0 2756 8 ? S 07:49 0:00 (apache)
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 128004 116104 11900 4328 2692 24740
-/+ buffers/cache: 88672 39332
Swap: 203036 12464 190572
Very strange, add up the %mem used by ps aux and it's only a few
percentage points, but free reports a radically different set of numbers.
I'm guessing that free doesn't report what I'm thinking (I'm sure the
kernel doesn't have a memory leak this big), but I have no idea what it is
and can't find any references to it.
thanks in advance!
--
Chris
<- Visit Me At <http://www.frostnet.advicom.net/chris/> ->
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