Memory usage

[scorp123]

so now I'm keeping an eye on my memory.

Try applying the swappiness and "dirty cache" parameters that I mentioned in my previous posting. Maybe this helps ... ?

Another question --and I am asking this because I ran into this problem recently on one of my servers-- are all your disks and filesystems OK? What filesystem do you use? Ext4? Or something else?

What happened to me is this: One of my servers where we were using the XFS filesystem (back when that server was installed, XFS was considered being better at handling large files than Ext2 or Ext3; Ext4 didn't exist yet) had a serious problem with one of its disks ... and because some processes were not able to get rid of their data in reasonable time (they couldn't write their stuff back because the disk couldn't keep pace) that data started filling that server's RAM pretty fast, and so the system got slower and slower ... When I checked /var/log/messages there were several warnings regarding I/O errors, filesystem errors, and what not. I had to replace that disk. Taddaaa, problem solved.

You don't happen to observe anything like that on your system? e.g. any mentioning of I/O errors, disk read or write errors or something like that in your log file, e.g. /var/log/messages? Or in the output of "dmesg"?

[kernco]

Try applying the swappiness and "dirty cache" parameters that I mentioned in my previous posting. Maybe this helps ... ?

I'll try these settings, but they're not going to address the root of the problem (memory leaks), just alleviate the symptoms.

Another question --and I am asking this because I ran into this problem recently on one of my servers-- are all your disks and filesystems OK? What filesystem do you use? Ext4? Or something else?

I have a single hard drive with three partitions: / using Ext4, /home using Ext4, and swap.

You don't happen to observe anything like that on your system? e.g. any mentioning of I/O errors, disk read or write errors or something like that in your log file, e.g. /var/log/messages? Or in the output of "dmesg"?

I don't see any I/O errors in my system log.

[_khAttAm_]

I booted into 2.6.35-1generic and the problem seems to have magically disappeared.. Let me see if the memory gradually increases again. With Filezilla, Chrome 6 with 5 tabs, Thunderbird 3, awn, apache/mysql, compiz, deluge, gnote and some more, mem usage is just 875MB (swap=0MB).. which seems fair till now...

I will post if it gets worse again.

Apparently, I figured out later that upgrade to this kernel did not solve the issue. When I use for prolonged time, it still continues using up more and more RAM, eventually starts paging and slowing things down..

To test this issue further, I disabled Desktop effects altogether (I had setup many compiz effects, which I backed up and disabled compiz from Appearance->None). Now, RAM usage at startup has decreased to 450MB from 950 MB, which is certainly better. I will use this for prolonged time and let you know what happens...

[lavinog]

Apparently, I figured out later that upgrade to this kernel did not solve the issue. When I use for prolonged time, it still continues using up more and more RAM, eventually starts paging and slowing things down..

To test this issue further, I disabled Desktop effects altogether (I had setup many compiz effects, which I backed up and disabled compiz from Appearance->None). Now, RAM usage at startup has decreased to 450MB from 950 MB, which is certainly better. I will use this for prolonged time and let you know what happens...

I just noticed you mentioned you are using xorg-edgers-ppa
There is a known issue with a gem leak. I think the issue still exists with xorg-edgers:
more info here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Testing/GEMLeak

what version does this report:

glxinfo | grep "GLX version"

If it says 1.4, that might be the cause.

[_khAttAm_]

I just noticed you mentioned you are using xorg-edgers-ppa
There is a known issue with a gem leak. I think the issue still exists with xorg-edgers:
more info here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Testing/GEMLeak

what version does this report:

glxinfo | grep "GLX version"

If it says 1.4, that might be the cause.

yes that was my version.. but I guess the problem existed with or without xorg-edgers.. I have nevertheless, added other PPA and installed the packages that came as upgrades and dist-upgrades.. Memory usage is low till now (783MB of 2GB and no swap usage at all, its just half an hour after restarting though).. I'll post if this solves the problem..

Thank you very much for your help.