[Novalug] Do I have a memory leak??

Ed James edjames@greenbelt.com
Fri Sep 26 16:19:07 EDT 2008


Mr. Tooth,

    Swap space being used isn't always a problem, unless pages are
constantly being swapped to/from swap space.  A slow machine (and
busy red light on your hard drive) would indicate this.

    My memory hog was my browser.  A quick test for this...open a
command line window and type "free -m".  You'll see "used" and "free"
mem and swap.  That gives you an idea of what's being used.  If
your browser is open, clear its cache, and do the "free -m" thing
again...see if there's a difference in memory usage.  Then close
the browser and "free -m" again.  If the browser isn't the problem,
as least it'll be eliminated from the list of suspects.

Ed James

Quoting Beartooth <beartooth@Beartooth.Info>:

>
>  	One of my machines, running Fedora 9, had gotten
> excruciatingly slow; and the first graph in the system monitor on
> the panel, showing memory and swap, was nearly always maxxed out
> -- reading in the upper nineties.
>
>  	I had more memory installed, doubling what it had before.
> Big improvement -- for a few days. Now it's as before.
>
>  	How do I tell what the problem is and what to do about
> it? Or can I? (Remember I don't code, and I don't speak
> hardware.) Fwiw, I'm not having similar problems with my other
> Fedora machines.



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