Howto: Determine cause of Memory Leak

[vylesilencer]

I am a PC Hardware and Networking person. I am no Linux expert, but I am learning, thanks to SEQ!

On my RedHat9 (no patches) system, running XFree86 version 4.3.0 with Gnome I am noticing a slow consumption of Memory (via the System Monitor) until eventually (~2-3 weeks uptime) the system becomes very lethargic and I reboot. The only application this system runs is SEQ. I am on the 2nd iteration of a complete RedHat wipe and re-install and the problem persists.

I am wondering if some of you with more extensive Linux knowledge can assist me in tracking down the culprit Memory leaker and destroy it?

Basic System specs:
Pentium 4 (mobile) 1.8 gig
512 MB RAM
Nvidia 4 2GO video w/64MB of RAM

Thanks in advance!

[Cryonic]

Top is your friend. It will show you what processes are eating up how much memory. Also just because all RAM seems to be used up, doesn't mean it really is. Linux loves memory and uses it to cache data that is requested from drives to reduce how often it actually has to go to the disc.

Example from my top:



8:11pm up 11 days, 6:56, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
56 processes: 55 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU0 states: 0.0% user, 0.0% system, 0.0% nice, 100.0% idle
CPU1 states: 0.0% user, 0.0% system, 0.0% nice, 100.0% idle
CPU2 states: 0.0% user, 0.1% system, 0.0% nice, 99.0% idle
CPU3 states: 0.1% user, 2.0% system, 0.0% nice, 96.0% idle
Mem: 255116K av, 251624K used, 3492K free, 0K shrd, 81524K buff
Swap: 1052248K av, 5232K used, 1047016K free 131304K cached


Notice how little memory is listed as free. Also notice the Buff and Cached amounts.

[BlueAdept]

I dont think that SEQ (the last stable release) has any memory leaks. It could be Gnome. I have had many problems with gnome and use KDE instead.

I dont use RH 9 though. Im still using 7.2 but have had SEQ running since the day the last version was released without re-booting.

If your problem is that it sits there for a long time after zoning, you should disable the item database. Use --itemdb-disable on the command line when loading SEQ.

[Endor]

I had somewhat the same issue, however I used top to find out that X seemed to have lots more memory than it should. So restarted X and all was fine. I am running suse 8.2 and gnome.