Memory leaks in Ubuntu?

[Michael Butash]

I should have mentioned, I have no issues with servers, only desktops
running x.  I have a server in my house with a year and a half uptime
with vmware on hardy.  :)

-mb


On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 13:32 -0700, Stephen wrote:
> 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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> 
>