From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-2smp i686) I'm not sure exactly where its coming from, but I lose much memory when using GUI applications in X... I have 256mb RAM, and on my initial graphical login, about 205 is free. However, the more graphical applications I run (like netscape, especially netscape), the less memory is there after I close the application. When I have 205 free, I'll load netscape, go to about 5 sites, close netscape, only to find that I now have 190mb RAM free. I'm running RH7.1 on a dual pentium III-800mhz machine w/ 256mb RAM. I'm also running no desktop managers and Enlightenment as my window manager (added /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/Enlightenment). Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Login to X 2. Run graphical applications, such as netscape 3. Close the applications Actual Results: Memory loss - see description. Expected Results: Memory should be freed correctly. If you need any more information just drop me an email.
What is your graphics card? What driver are you using? There seems to be an unidentified memory leak somewhere...this is known to be true for (unsupported) NVIDIA drivers (not nv) and perhaps some matrox drivers although I have not been able to get back to person who reported the matrox problem.
Linux does not work like that. Free memory is *wasted* memory. Memory is a valuable resource, and if it is sitting around doing nothing then it is wasted, as such, Linux maximizes the usage of memory by keeping all memory busy at all times - minus a meg or two for fast allocation. When you reboot your system, and it comes up, most memory is free. So it will remain so until something uses it. The kernel uses free memory for buffer/disk caching, so once the system has been running for a short period, ALL memory should be showing up used. This is 100% correct operation. On another note, if you look at "top" or "ps" output you may notice the "X" process showing a large number for "SIZE" of memory used. This number is NOT the amount of RAM being used. It includes the size of your video memory, and memory mapped i/o registers, etc. The output of "top" and "ps" are thus misleading. What you are seeing is normal proper behaviour. There is no memory leak.
That is true for the total memory but how about individual processes? When I use the nv driver X *always* shows around 65MB and when konqueror is loading a very large page it goes up to 53MB. When I switch to NIVIDA drivers X shows around 188MB and loading the same page with konqueror takes it upto 300MB's. At that point I can just watch the system start to hang and freeze (384MB ram). So, you do get some info from top. May be it is not a leak....but considering the number of people reporting the same problem here and in news groups indicate that there is something wrong. So far I saw this problem mostly with NVIDIA drivers plus one guy reporting Matrox but I could not get back to him. That is why I was wondering if this person is using the NVIDIA as well.
Hrm... it seems I'm not able to reproduce the problem anymore after upgrading to Netscape 4.77 via the RHN. Closing Netscape brings me back to 205mb free. Do you think that it was possibly a netscape problem? I think so, because I noticed that the more pages I went to, the more memory was eaten, and there was no bottom limit.
BTW, graphics card is ATI Rage 2000 Pro (128bit, 32mb RAM)
I don't think it was Netscape problem since I had the problem with Konqueror, more likely some library they were compiled against....presumably fixed before 4.77 was compiled.