Physical memory disappeared from /proc/meminfo

From: Joris van Rantwijk
Date: Tue Jun 24 2008 - 01:17:39 EST


My system got into a situation where a lot of physical memory is
in use. I want to know where this memory is being used, but it
seems to have become untraceable somehow.

My total physical memory is 1 GB.
Adding up all VSZ numbers from "ps auxw" gets me to about 75 MB,
so I should have a lot of free memory but I don't see it.

My kernel is Linux 2.6.25.4 for x86_64 with a 32-bit userland.
I disabled swap to make it easier to investigate this issue.

One problem is that I can't really make sense of /proc/meminfo.
As far as I understand the numbers, I find that about 640 MB is
unaccounted for.

For example I would expect that
MemTotal = MemFree + Buffers + Cached + AnonPages + Mapped + Slab.

Is that a valid assumption?
Why does it not hold for my machine?
Is this a bug in the memory statistics?
What part of the system is using all this untraceable memory?

/proc/meminfo:
MemTotal: 996320 kB
MemFree: 67708 kB
Buffers: 17716 kB
Cached: 62412 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 27320 kB
Inactive: 58720 kB
SwapTotal: 0 kB
SwapFree: 0 kB
Dirty: 12 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 5932 kB
Mapped: 3916 kB
Slab: 193560 kB
SReclaimable: 26076 kB
SUnreclaim: 167484 kB
PageTables: 464 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 498160 kB
Comitted_AS: 15536 kB
VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed: 600 kB
VmallocChunk: 34359736326 kB

Please help.

Joris.

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