Memory leaks in Ubuntu?

[Michael Butash]

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