Memory leaks?

[Michael D Green]

On Friday, 28 Mar 2003 21:38:15, James Richard Tyrer <tyrerj at acm.orgwrote:
>
> Michael D Green wrote:
> > ...
> > KDE System Guard shows that over a period of an hour or so (perhaps much
> > less) after startup the physical memory usage increases to very near the
> > maximum available (384 MB) and swap memory starts to be used. With time
> > the amount of swap memory being used increases, but never seems to
> > decrease. And the physical memory stays near saturation. It will decrease
> > a little when I shut down an application. But there seems to be some
> > overall rachetting, which makes me think there is a memory leak
> > somewhere.
> >...
> > What I would like to be able to do is free up the memory that is not
> > being used (physical and swap). I suspect there is a way to do this that
> > is easier than rebooting the machine. Perhaps there is even an
> > application which can do it for me.
>
> Don't you have KDE System Guard set up to show: Application, Buffered, and
> Cache in different colors?  If so, you can see what is happening: the
> amount of memory used for Cache is what keeps increasing.  If you had a
> memory leak then the amount of Application memory would increase.

Thanks! And thanks to all of the others who have also given helpful responses! 
(I get the digest version, so am using this to respond to all on this 
thread.)

I do have KDE System Guard set up to show: Application, Buffered, and Cache in 
different colors. And I see that it is cache that is what keeps increasing.

Am I to understand, then, that for cache to keep increasing causes no 
problems? 

As you can see, I don't know enough about how things work to understand the 
difference between application, buffered, and cache memory any more than the 
very qualitative understanding that the three words themselves convey.

My concern now is simply one of does increasing cache memory consumption drag 
down performance and, if so, can I do anything about it?

TIA!

Mike Green
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