Gentoo Using Loads of Memory

[rjemerson]

I've noticed over the last few days that my swap space is slowly filling up, even though available memory isn't maxed out. This clears when I reboot. A search through the forums showed that this can be explained by a leak in the latest stable NVidia drivers, so I updated to the latest unstable ones.

That seemed to fix the swap problem, but I'm hitting a new one: Now the available memory is close to being maxed out! top shows zero swap used, but 491200k of used memory, with 22760k free. I'm thinking there's a memory leak somewhere, but I don't know where its coming from...X is the major memory user, but its only showing up as using 5.1% (which isn't 491 MB).

I'm running Gentoo 1.4 on a Pentium 4 1.8GHz with 512 MB RAM, NVidia GEForce 2 video card.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[rac]

Is this different than the disk cache? That expands to fill memory, but gives it up when something more deserving needs it.
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[rjemerson]

Doesn't seem to be the cache, although I'm not 100% sure...its a gradual filling up of available memory (formerly the swap space). I'm not seeing any "more deserving" processes getting memory when things max out.

Something I didn't put in previously: Before I installed the new NVidia drivers (ie, when it was still a swap problem), everything got freed up on reboot. However, the system hung at the "Deactivating swap" portion of shutdown. Not sure if this is related to the current issue, but it couldn't hurt to put it in.

Thanks.

[delta407]

[rjemerson]

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 513960 497088 16872 0 23720 395000
-/+ buffers/cache: 78368 435592
Swap: 995988 0 995988

[rjemerson]

Does block device cache also eat into swap space? I just noticed that my memory's nearly maxed out, and now swap's getting consumed.

bash-2.05b# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 513960 492972 20988 0 52968 334600
-/+ buffers/cache: 105404 408556
Swap: 995988 1388 994600