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Re: Strange memory consumption
It's not an 'all-X' system, and it's not serving frequent mem requests or
such. It's a scientific workstation running number-crunching jobs. The
phenomenon I describe appears when no such job is active anymore, however.
I'll try to llok it up in dejanews, as you suggest, and report back to the
list if I come up with anything interesting. If anyone has more ideas -
any hint will be appreciated.
Tuvik
On Sun, 22 Feb 1998, Peter L. Peres wrote:
> Just a wild guess: You are running an 'all-X' system. There was a bug
> somewhere in init that made it go berserk if there was nothing open on a
> console once upon a time. The bug caused very high load w/o reason, but no
> memory leaks. The remedy was, to leave a login (getty whatever) in
> inittab on the X-only runlevel. It's also possible that there is a problem
> with the chipset and/or caching with that much ram. Dejanews ?
>
> Re: Memory: If I remember well from my kernel hacking sessions, then the
> malloced memory is not reclaimed as soon as freed by the app, instead it
> is freed when the list of free blocks gets too short (which is good for
> GC). If one of your sessions would grab pieces of memory for buffers and
> release them often, such as for example to serve Xsession requests, then
> it would look like that in 'free'. This one is just a wild guess, but I
> know that it takes up to 5 seconds for freed memory to show in a mem/free
> listing under load.
>
> hope this helps,
> Peter
>