On Thursday 07 February 2008 00:08:01 Tero Pesonen wrote:
On Wednesday 06 February 2008, Sloan wrote:
Yes, Linux uses RAM as buffers but If a program needs RAM the kernel will give it what it needs.
Unused RAM is a waste. Linux puts lazy RAM to work, it doesn't let it lay around unused.
This may be a stupid question... but yesterday I noticed that free -m showed +/- buffers/cache free to be about 400 on my 1GB desktop. Typically I run close to 700 free even with Firefox running. So I checked if something was grabbing a lot of memory, and indeed ksysguard showed for kmail VmRss to be > 380 000. Typically kmail runs at VmRss 30 000 - 40 000.
This happened after I had copied messages from a folder on one server to a folder on another. Both IMAP servers. I copied more messages, and it seemed kmail's VmRss kept on growing. It even passed 400 000. However, once I settled for "normal" use, i.e. was done with the copying, the memory use for kmail remained the same, although I would have expected the opposite, i.e. it to free this memory it needed for copying. Even 6 hours later it was still using exactly the same amount of memory.
I was wondering if this is normal, and kmail would have freed some of this memory if other processes would have needed it (it no longer needed for copying -- copying was finished long ago), or whether it actually leaked this memory and failed to free it. I mean, does this VmRss correspond to actual reserved memory (like, well, malloced in C), or does it mean something else?
If I am able to reproduce this, is it a bug, or am I seeing normal memory use for a process on Linux?
That definitely sounds like a bug in kmail. Its imap implementation is relatively weak compared to other programs, there are quite a few problems with it But what you're describing is not standard caching behaviour. Especially since there's no possibility to limit it in the config There are memory leaks in kmail, I run into them frequently. I would report what you've seen as a bug, if I were you (if you can reproduce it) Anders -- Madness takes its toll -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org