Strange memory/cpu behavior

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Oct 07, 2008 at 09:10:07PM -0700, Yuri wrote:
> Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
>> I'm a little confused.  I was mainly referring to your statement:
>>
>> "There is one large active process slowly growing in memory from 500MB
>> to 1300MB, not reading or writing any files."
>>
>> What field in top(1) were you looking at to determine this kind of
>> growth?
>>   
>
> Sorry, I misunderstood the question first.
> Memory is taken from the SIZE column, but RES is always very close.

Generally speaking, you do not want to be looking at SIZE to determine
how much memory a process is taking up -- you want to look at RES.

SIZE includes memory shared across all processes which rely on loaded
shared objects.  For example, if you had 20 processes running which were
all linked with libssh.so.4, only one copy of libssh.so.4 would exist
in memory, and all 20 of those processes would share it.

On later versions of FreeBSD 7.0 and on 7.1, there is the procstat(1)
utility which can be used to break down memory usage.

As for your CPU usage issue, I'm not quite sure what you're referring
to.  It might help if we could see some actual output from top(1)
pointing to what you're describing.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |