basically, buffer and page (one or the other, but not normally both at the
same time) cache are not freed. the memory leakage gets to the point where
there is almost no memory actually availaable to run programs in.
this is on a 16MB machine, with a fairly minimal kernel, and there's less
than A MEGABYTE left to actually do anything.
below is what I get after booting it up and leaving it for about 4 hours.
PID TTY MAJFLT MINFLT TRS DRS SIZE SWAP RSS SHRD LIB DT COMMAND
1 ? 252 65 0 0 116 116 0 0 0 0 (init)
2 ? 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 (kflushd)
3 ? 7254 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 (kswapd)
399 1 460 126 0 0 372 372 0 0 0 0 (login)
186 2 145 28 0 0 104 104 0 0 0 0 (mingetty)
19 ? 2534 180 0 0 100 96 4 0 4 0 (kerneld)
120 ? 4416 241 0 0 156 156 0 0 0 0 (syslogd)
129 ? 2046 146 0 0 124 124 0 0 0 0 (klogd)
151 ? 23 30 0 0 136 136 0 0 0 0 (inetd)
162 ? 38 30 0 0 108 108 0 0 0 0 (lpd)
177 ? 834 118 0 0 112 112 0 0 0 0 (qmail-sen
179 ? 171 16 0 0 80 80 0 0 0 0 (splogger)
180 ? 101 18 0 0 72 72 0 0 0 0 (qmail-lsp
181 ? 77 12 0 0 72 72 0 0 0 0 (qmail-rsp
182 ? 93 16 0 0 92 92 0 0 0 0 (qmail-cle
187 3 141 27 0 0 104 104 0 0 0 0 (mingetty)
188 4 134 28 0 0 104 104 0 0 0 0 (mingetty)
189 5 129 28 0 0 104 104 0 0 0 0 (mingetty)
190 6 131 27 0 0 104 104 0 0 0 0 (mingetty)
183 ? 920 125 0 0 168 168 0 0 0 0 (sshd)
192 ? 3698 4 4 0 120 92 28 28 24 0 (update)
974 1 1590 394 24 0 244 208 36 36 12 0 (bash)
140 ? 4081 2090 0 8 156 120 36 36 28 9 (crond)
1012 1 198 46 32 68 428 8 420 292 320 27 ps auxm
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 14212 14044 168 548 9248 1904
-/+ buffers: 2892 11320
Swap: 130684 2556 128128
Simon Karpen
karpes@rpi.edu, slk@acm.rpi.edu, slk@karpes.stu.rpi.edu
In a world without fences, who needs Gates?
--Scott McNealy