Hello, My system recently started to act as if it is low on memory: much harddisk activity and relatively high usage of swap. I have not seen such behaviour before. The problem seems to persist even after stopping nearly all applications including the X server. I have not rebooted the machine yet, because I want to understand this situation before I destroy it. My question: What part of the system is using up my physical memory? Can anyone help me figure out this issue? Physical memory is 1 GB. I disabled swap just to make it easier to investigate this issue. My kernel is Linux 2.6.25.4 for x86_64 with a 32-bit userland. Adding up all VSZ numbers from "ps auxw" gets me to about 75 MB, so I figure I should have lots and lots of free memory. But /proc/meminfo gives me: MemTotal: 996320 kB MemFree: 67708 kB Buffers: 17716 kB Cached: 62412 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 27320 kB Inactive: 58720 kB SwapTotal: 0 kB SwapFree: 0 kB Dirty: 12 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 5932 kB Mapped: 3916 kB Slab: 193560 kB SReclaimable: 26076 kB SUnreclaim: 167484 kB PageTables: 464 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB CommitLimit: 498160 kB Comitted_AS: 15536 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB VmallocUsed: 600 kB VmallocChunk: 34359736326 kB One of my problems is that I really don't know how to read /proc/meminfo. What do the numbers mean? Are there rules such as Slab = SReclaimable + SUnreclaim? For example, it seems to me that all physical memory must be used either by slab, cache or userland. So I tried adding it all up: Buffers + Cached + AnonPages + Mapped + Slab + MemFree = 351244. That is still way below 1 GB, so where are my other 645076 kB? I'm starting to suspect a problem in the kernel. I upgraded to 2.6.25.4 a few weeks before this problem came up. Also, I'm now running with CONFIG_SPARSEMEM while all my previous kernels used CONFIG_FLATMEM. Any help appreciated. Joris. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send an email with "unsubscribe kernelnewbies" to ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxx Please read the FAQ at http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ
