I am not sure what everyone else's environments are like, but I am definitely getting memory infinitely swallowed into Netfilter somewhere. I have userspace programs, but put together they take less than 5% of the system memory. I forced myself to reboot once the ACTIVE memory takes 95% of the CPU, which was every 3 weeks with 196mb of RAM. This server averaged 200 - 250 connection tracks during office hours. The ramping active memory usage went up in a very linear pattern until it took all the system, at which point I would have to reboot due to performance degradation. The last reboot, I decided to play with the machine's settings and add some memory totaling 256MB. I also disabled my SWAP partition because I have a few database servers that perform fantastically when kswapd isn't used much. The result: Active memory 'seems' to have stabilized around 75MB at least for the few days that it has been stable. I cannot tell if this was totally kswap's fault, or even if the problem has been fixed at all. It does look promising though.
