okay so whats with this leak

**Elcid247** · February 19th, 2010

There has been posts all over the place about the ubuntu memory leak and i personally have experienced it on 32 bit and 64 bit versions of ubuntu and every one keeps giving different reasons for it.

has any1 been able so far to pin it down to a final place? i really wana know whats causing this cause its a huge performance set back

**cariboo** · February 19th, 2010

What program is causing the memory leak? You should be able to check using top in a terminal.

**Elcid247** · February 21st, 2010

well thats the problem, nothing is taking it up, if i add the memory usage, it gives around ±500 MB, but when i see in the system monitor it says 1.4 GB :S

i have nothing but firefox and pidgin, chrome gives same result even if i don't use any, it just fills up with no reason whatsoever

**nixclusive** · February 21st, 2010

you can use the command,

Code:

free -m

to display the amount of memory available. The number(s) after "-/+ buffers/cache" is the actual amount of memory used/available.

**efflandt** · February 22nd, 2010

Which Ubuntu version? People may come up with different reasons because it is not a general issue. It must be due to some specific software, configuration, or hardware. Did you boot from an iso image (CD or USB) or are you using a ramdisk or tmpfs?

Does ps aux show anything in a zombie state or race condition, or using a significant percentage of your RAM (or cpu)?

My 64-bit 9.10 has currently been up for over 3 days, and with Firefox running, either free in a terminal, or System Monitor show less than 500 MB being used.

**Elcid247** · February 25th, 2010

Code:

free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2992       2642        350          0        454       1042
-/+ buffers/cache:       1145       1846
Swap:            0          0          0

i've attached a screenshot for my system monitor, showing processes from all users. u can see it shouldn't add up to like 500 MB or something

its ubuntu 9.10 now on 32-bit.

i'm using my brand new hp dv6-1390

though there are some processes which have N/A under the memory field, like ata_aux or kacpi_notify, is that normal?

i have no zombies btw its all running or sleeping processes.

**skymera** · February 25th, 2010

Hello

Are you running 9.10 or 10.04?

I've found Ureadahead has a bug where it DOESN'T release memory after it profiles boot.

This pushes RAM usage to 1200MB-ish, but RAM usage goes back to normal on subsequent boots, until the boot is profiled again.

**2hot6ft2** · February 25th, 2010

Originally Posted by Elcid247

well thats the problem, nothing is taking it up, if i add the memory usage, it gives around ±500 MB, but when i see in the system monitor it says 1.4 GB :S

i have nothing but firefox and pidgin, chrome gives same result even if i don't use any, it just fills up with no reason whatsoever

Pidgin has had memory leak problems for a long time. Maybe it still does.

pidgin memory leak search

**&)ky#)^** · February 26th, 2010

I don't usually experience any memory links on my system using Karmic. However, Synaptic while idle just ate all my real and virtual memory. I killed it and everything went back to normal except that Firefox hanged itself and my screen flashed black for a second and then an icon near the bottom appeared saying my display server is broken. Anybody have anything that came close to this?