Memory leaks in Ubuntu?

[Stephen]

I honestly have not seen this as an issue before, but i usually poked
my machines with a sick until they rebooted once a week because of
what i was doing to them.

the servers i have running run for a month at a time without a reboot.

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Michael Butash<michael at butash.net> wrote:
> Has anyone else seen or experienced persistent memory leaks with ubuntu
> 32bit or 64?  I've literally had issues with it that may or may not be
> particularly ubuntu issues back to 7.04 that I first noticed.  The only
> thing really in common system-wise is the hardware, and I somewhat
> suspect it's Nvidia driver related, but nothing really indicates any
> particular app.  My primary desktop I use heavily just about anything,
> but I have another system that's sole purpose is to play movies and
> music on my TV I do almost nothing with that experiences the same
> issues, NVidia card as well.  With compiz or without this happens.  Only
> thing I haven't tried is running the NV drivers, but I rely on the
> acceleration far too much on both systems.
>
> What I have noticed is there are no direct applications hogging memory
> via top, rather it seems virtual memory ends up simply taking over all
> physical memory and keeping it as "inactive" via "vmstat -a".  Signs of
> this include firefox flipping out, rendering/scaling video larger than
> default, and just anything else that requires excessive memory use
> having issues.  I graph my physical memory usage via snmp, and I can
> pretty accurately gauge how long I have until I need to do a hard reboot
> to reclaim the "inactive" memory.  It mostly works even memory starved
> in this condition, just limits my usage, and even restarting x doesn't
> help.  Interestingly enough, neither system ever swaps at all...
>
> Has anyone successfully ever dealt with an issue like this killing
> virtual memory?  I really can't imagine I'm the only one...  I've hunted
> far and wide of the great interweb for a way to release the "inactive"
> memory, as I'd even just go so far as to purge it once a day via cron if
> I had to, but I can find nothing of forcefully clearing inactive/dirty
> virtual memory space.  I've seen others complain of the same behavior,
> but have only seen the same rhetoric that "trust linux virtual memory
> behavior, that's what it's supposed to do".  Act like a stupid windoze
> me install and reboot daily?  I think not...
>
> -mb
>
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-- 
A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from
rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.

Stephen