Re: Latency data - 2.6.14-rc3-rt13

[Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>]

On Tue, 11 Oct 2005, Lee Revell wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 18:09 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:
> > Should free memory drop like that over time?
>
> Yes this is perfectly normal.  When a system first boots all the memory
> your apps aren't using is initially free.  As applications access more
> data over time then it will be cached in memory until free memory drops
> to near zero.
>
> "Free memory" is actually wasted memory - it's better to use all
> available RAM for caching.
>

But the swap being touched bothers me.  Although I've had problems with
leaving Mozilla up for long times and it leaking. Without Mozilla running
and running lots of other apps, I have almost 100% memory used, but 0%
swap.

If the swap starts to increase slowly over time, you _do_ have a
leak somewhere.  Probably not in the kernel (kernel memory never goes into
swap). But if you want to see if the kernel is leaking, examine
/proc/slabinfo once in a while and if you see something there constantly
growing, then that might indicate a leak.  Just pay attention to the first
column.

-- Steve