James Ogley said:
Check the thread from a few days ago about updatedb. It looks like a real problem somewhere in that.
Cheers, had a look over it, so it seems people agree that there's a memory leak problem, because it's not just the 'free' memory, but the available memory that's reduced, which is what I was saying in my mail.
Peter Kleiweg mentioned a program he'd written which with funky use of malloc() frees up memory, a neat hack to fix it (Peter any chance you can pop the code somewhere?)
However, seems to me that there must be a better solution, anyone know if there's a patch for this (GNU findutils hasn't been updated since November 1994...)
If there's a problem I think it's in the kernel's VM code. After all, that's what's responsible for freeing up code that processes don't free up themselves. On a side note, if Peter's code works, then there is no memory problem as such. At least not if I understood what he did correctly. If just malloc()ing memory clears it up, then the problem is in how "free" reports memory usage. I don't have systems running long enough, so I don't know if this deteriorates badly enough that it starts swapping and requires a reboot. Does it? //Anders