Infrastructure Software

Hi,

I noticed yesterday that my machine was becoming increasingly slow, where once it was pretty snappy. It's a Compaq SR5250NX with 1GB of RAM. Upon checking vmstat, I noticed that the "Free" column was ~191MB. Now, the only applications I had open were FireFox 2.0.11, GAIM, and StarOffice. I closed all of them, and the number reported in the "Free" column became approximately 195MB. "Pagefile" was about 5.5x that size. There were no other applications running and it's a single user machine, so I was the only one logged in. System uptime: 9 days.

I logged out, logged back in, to see if that had an affect. It did not. Rebooted and obviously, that fixed it. Now with only FireFox, GAIM, and a terminal open, vmstat reports "Free" as ~450MB. I've noticed if I run vmstat every few seconds, the "Free" total keeps going down. Example:

unknown% vmstat
 kthr      memory            page            disk          faults      cpu
 r b w   swap  free  re  mf pi po fr de sr cd s0 s1 s2   in   sy   cs us sy id
 0 0 0 870888 450220  9  27 10  0  1  0  8  2 -0 -0 -0  595 1193  569 72  1 28
unknown% vmstat
 kthr      memory            page            disk          faults      cpu
 r b w   swap  free  re  mf pi po fr de sr cd s0 s1 s2   in   sy   cs us sy id
 0 0 0 870880 450204  9  27 10  0  1  0  8  2 -0 -0 -0  596 1193  569 72  1 28
unknown% vmstat
 kthr      memory            page            disk          faults      cpu
 r b w   swap  free  re  mf pi po fr de sr cd s0 s1 s2   in   sy   cs us sy id
 0 0 0 870828 450092  9  27 10  0  1  0  8  2 -0 -0 -0  596 1193  570 71  1 28
unknown%

Output of prstat -u Kendall (my username ) is as follows:

   PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/NLWP
  2026 Kendall   124M   70M sleep   59    0   0:01:47 1.4% firefox-bin/7
  1093 Kendall    85M   77M sleep   59    0   0:07:15 1.1% Xsun/1
  1802 Kendall    60M   15M sleep   59    0   0:00:08 0.1% gnome-terminal/2
  1301 Kendall    93M   23M sleep   49    0   0:00:30 0.1% java/14
  1259 Kendall    53M   15M sleep   49    0   0:00:32 0.1% gaim/1
  2133 Kendall  3312K 2740K cpu1    59    0   0:00:00 0.0% prstat/1
  1276 Kendall    51M   12M sleep   59    0   0:00:11 0.0% gnome-netstatus/1
  1247 Kendall    46M   10M sleep   59    0   0:00:06 0.0% metacity/1
  1274 Kendall    51M   13M sleep   59    0   0:00:05 0.0% wnck-applet/1
  1249 Kendall    56M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:07 0.0% gnome-panel/1
  1278 Kendall    48M 9240K sleep   59    0   0:00:05 0.0% mixer_applet2/1
  1245 Kendall  9092K 3844K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% gnome-smproxy/1
  1227 Kendall  8244K 4444K sleep   59    0   0:00:01 0.0% xscreensaver/1
  1201 Kendall  4252K 1664K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% sdt_shell/1
  1217 Kendall    55M   16M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% gnome-session/1
   779 Kendall    47M 2208K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% gnome-volcheck/1
   746 Kendall  5660K 3660K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% bonobo-activati/1
  1270 Kendall    49M   10M sleep   49    0   0:00:00 0.0% clock-applet/1
  1280 Kendall    47M 8904K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% notification-ar/1
  1199 Kendall  2928K  884K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% dsdm/1
  1262 Kendall    47M 2268K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% gnome-volcheck/1
Total: 37 processes, 62 lwps, load averages: 0.11, 0.98, 1.63

System uptime is 9 hours, 48 minutes. I'm just wondering why the memory usage seems so high to do...nothing. It's obviously a real problem as the machine turned very slow when vmstat was showing 195MB free.

Any tips, tricks, advice, on which way to go with this?

Thanks!