[Novalug] Do I have a memory leak??

[Beartooth]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2008, Ed James wrote:

> Mr. Tooth,
>
>    Swap space being used isn't always a problem, unless pages 
> are constantly being swapped to/from swap space.  A slow 
> machine (and busy red light on your hard drive) would indicate 
> this.
>
>    My memory hog was my browser.  A quick test for this...open 
> a command line window and type "free -m".  You'll see "used" 
> and "free" mem and swap.  That gives you an idea of what's 
> being used.  If your browser is open, clear its cache, and do 
> the "free -m" thing again...see if there's a difference in 
> memory usage.  Then close the browser and "free -m" again.  If 
> the browser isn't the problem, as least it'll be eliminated 
> from the list of suspects.

 	I did that several times. First, just as it was :

[btth at hbsk ~]$ free -m
              total       used       free     shared    buffers 
cached
Mem:          1994       1485        508          0        187 
534
-/+ buffers/cache:        763       1231
Swap:         1983        693       1290

 	Then with opera's or firefox's cache emptied (I *knew* I 
should've labelled things somehow!) :

[btth at hbsk ~]$ free -m
              total       used       free     shared    buffers 
cached
Mem:          1994       1485        509          0        188 
534
-/+ buffers/cache:        763       1231
Swap:         1983        693       1290

 	Then with both opera's and firefox's caches emptied (but 
both still running) :

[btth at hbsk ~]$ free -m
              total       used       free     shared    buffers 
cached
Mem:          1994       1484        510          0        188 
533
-/+ buffers/cache:        763       1231
Swap:         1983        693       1290

 	Then with opera closed, firefox still running :

[btth at hbsk ~]$ free -m
              total       used       free     shared    buffers 
cached
Mem:          1994       1392        602          0        188 
520
-/+ buffers/cache:        682       1312
Swap:         1983        693       1290

 	Then with both closed :

[btth at hbsk ~]$ free -m
              total       used       free     shared    buffers 
cached
Mem:          1994       1947         46          0          0 
38
-/+ buffers/cache:       1909         85
Swap:         1983        875       1108
[btth at hbsk ~]$

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, Not Quite Clueless Power User
Fedora 8 & 9; Alpine 2.0, Pan 0.132; Privoxy 3.0.6;
Dillo 0.8, Epiphany 2, Firefox 2 & 3, Galeon 2, Opera 9
Remember I know little (precious little!) of where up is.