[Tfug] Memory woes

[Christopher Robbins]

On 2/4/07, Stephen Hooper <stephen.hooper at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/4/07, Christopher Robbins <robbinsc at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > It's running 2.6.18, x86_64 version.  I'm leaning towards the install
> being
> > borked.  I mean, running 'top',
> > everything looks out of whack.  Even things that shouldn't be sucking
> down
> > memory (non-leaking Firefox, ssh connections,
> > etc) are killing huge amounts of free memory.  Running a media player
> and a
> > torrent downloader has taken all but 10 mb of
> > available system memory.  This isn't right at all.
>
> That's not necessarily a bad thing.  If you observe those processes,
> are they actually consuming that memory, or is it being allocated to
> things like buffer-cache, etc?
>
> If it is just the kernel occupying the memory, then it is right at all! :)
>
> If by "thrashing" you mean that things are getting swapped out to disk
> too frequently then obviously there is something wrong with your
> virtual memory configuration:  you could try to load a different I/O
> scheduler, and also spend some time figuring out what is causing
> things to have to be flushed to disk so often...
>
> What does  vmstat look like for a nice sized run?



Running amarok and firefox...

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system--
----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id
wa
 0  0      0 376308  29820 602120    0    0    68    15  775  953  6  1 91
1


If it helps, a view of the top ten processes from top

Tasks:  99 total,   3 running,  95 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s):  8.6%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 90.4%id,  0.7%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.3%si,
0.0%st
Mem:   1285148k total,   918472k used,   366676k free,    30008k buffers
Swap:   530104k total,        0k used,   530104k free,   607616k cached

4341 robbinsc  15   0  482m  63m  31m S  6.0  5.1   1:43.06 amarokapp
 5198 robbinsc  15   0  150m  53m  19m S  0.0  4.2   0:08.33 firefox-bin
 3658 root      15   0  108m  41m 7328 S  0.0  3.3   2:40.24 Xorg
 4324 robbinsc  15   0  202m  23m  16m S  0.0  1.8   0:01.02 kicker
 3595 mysql     15   0  133m  22m 4528 S  0.0  1.8   0:00.14 mysqld
 4321 robbinsc  15   0  141m  22m  12m S  0.0  1.8   0:00.86 kdesktop
 4361 robbinsc  15   0  137m  21m  12m S  0.0  1.7   0:00.92 zen-updater
 4590 robbinsc  15   0  138m  18m  12m R  0.0  1.5   0:00.66 konsole
 4370 robbinsc  15   0  128m  16m  11m S  0.0  1.3   0:00.15 kmix
 4311 robbinsc  15   0  174m  16m  12m S  0.0  1.3   0:00.27 kded

Things don't feel as bad as they have been in days past.  I don't know what
brought on the change.  Since I restarted this morning, I have yet to hit
the
swap...

Thanks for all the help,

    -Chris


-- 
Chris Robbins
Systems Programmer
Department of English - University of Arizona
http://www.homerengineeringcorp.net