memory usage displsy

[Bill Moran]

In response to Per olof Ljungmark <peo at intersonic.se>:

> Bill Moran wrote:
> > In response to Per olof Ljungmark <peo at intersonic.se>:
> > 
> >> Dan Nelson wrote:
> >>> In the last episode (Sep 01), Bill Moran said:
> >>>> In response to Per olof Ljungmark <peo at intersonic.se>:
> >>>>> What is a good way to find out how memory is used? Have a 6.4 box where
> >>>>> memory is used by something but I fail to see what is using it - tried
> >>>>> different switches to ps(1), tried the stat tools but a big chunk of
> >>>>> memory does not show at all.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> A proper tool for analyzing memory usage "live", this is a production
> >>>>> box?
> >>>> I've always been able to get what I need from top.  You can do -o res to
> >>>> sort by resident memory usage, which helps.
> >>> ps will sort by memory usage when given the -m flag.  Also check ipcs -a to
> >>> see if there are any sysv shared memory segments hanging arnound.  If you
> >>> don't see anything using the memory, where are you seeing that "something"
> >>> is using it?
> >>>
> >> ...and here is top output after I stopped Postfix, slapd and Cyrus-IMAP. 
> >> Still over 3G Active.
> > 
> > <snip>
> > 
> > You did not sort by res and there are only 40 processes showing, which
> > means your output is truncated and may have truncated the problematic
> > process.
> > 
> > Please use "top -o res" to get the output sorted by memory usage, or
> > don't truncate the output (former preferred).
> > 
> > Also, please provide the output of "ipcs -a"
> 
> There was no more processes...

>From your top output:
> 45 processes:  1 running, 44 sleeping

There were 40 processes listed, so there were 5 not shown.

> ipcs -a

OK, this verifies that nothing is tied up in shared memory.

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com
http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/