HELP!!! Kubuntu FILLS MY RAM in a pair of ours and STILLS!!

[HaPo]

Hello every one!

I truly can't understand this:
when I start the system it uses less then 500 Mb of ram.
Then I open Super Karamba and some little panel for system information like Ram status, Processor display and network display.
I open Kaffeine and I listen my favorites tracks.
So, I open Firefox to navigate web (with 5-6 tabs in average)
Then I can open Kopete for chattin with friends.
At this moment system uses 700 Mb ... that's ok...
If I close most of application leaving only kaffeine and Superkaramba working
After some ours the situation is tragic!

I hope this can help:

root@my-desktop:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1555780 1518112 37668 0 137256 1136504
-/+ buffers/cache: 244352 1311428
Swap: 1076312 0 107631


top - 12:24:50 up 16:17, 1 user, load average: 0.19, 0.31, 0.35
Tasks: 120 total, 5 running, 115 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s):100.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1555780k total, 1509956k used, 45824k free, 136748k buffers
Swap: 1076312k total, 0k used, 1076312k free, 1124008k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
16338 root 20 0 18268 14m 11m R 89.3 0.9 0:00.97 apt-index-watch
7022 h4p0 15 0 148m 41m 22m S 6.0 2.7 51:47.11 kaffeine
6318 h4p0 16 0 34176 21m 16m R 3.0 1.4 2:44.22 superkaramba
1 root 16 0 1632 536 448 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.17 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 ksoftirqd/0
3 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0
4 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:08.93 events/0
5 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 khelper
6 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthread
8 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 kblockd/0
9 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
10 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpi_notify
98 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
134 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pdflush
135 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 pdflush
136 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 kswapd0
137 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0




it uses about all ram present and doesn't use a single byte of swap!

at this point if I open some other program in FREEZE totally! and I've got to reset!!
Is this possible?

PLEASE HELP ME

I post my Hw config:

P4 3.0Ghz
temperature is 65° (is this normal??)
1.5Gb of ddr ram
mb Asus p800
nvidia ge force 3 ti200

[MepisReign]

Re: HELP!!! Kubuntu FILLS MY RAM in a pair of ours and STILLS!!

I would say that is normal, any Linux flavor will allocate RAM that way, try another karamba themes for testing purposes

Regards,

MepisReign

[dibl]

Re: HELP!!! Kubuntu FILLS MY RAM in a pair of ours and STILLS!!

This is one of those "It should not do that!" questions, I think ....

That P4 looks pretty toasty at 65 -- does it have a fan installed, with thermal grease? I have a machine with a Pentium D950 and the stock Intel fan that came with it was insufficient -- I got an Arctic Freezer 7 fan and Arctic silver thermal compound. The Intel desktop utility shows thermal red zone beginning at 67/68, so you're pushing it to let it run that hot.

I'm not real knowledgeable about Linux memory management, but I have noticed that mine never uses any swap, no matter what I do. I have 4 GB installed on this system, and Linux recognizes only about 3.2GB of that. Sometimes it appears that a big database app that I have left open but not used recently sort of "falls asleep", and upon giving it a command, there is a considerable lag while it "wakes up" and becomes active for me. You might want to verify that the "lockup" that you are observing is not just a "delayed response".

Also, rather than reboot the computer, you should try pulling up the Kmenu>System>KSysGuard performance monitor, and in the Process Table view, look for the line that is your app that you believe is locked. Kill just that app, and then see if your system is responsive again.

If your entire system is truly locking, then that is a very bad indicator -- you should check it with a different OS, and see if maybe it's a hardware problem. Get Memtest and make sure your RAM chips are good -- stuff like that.

HTH

[HaPo]

Re: HELP!!! Kubuntu FILLS MY RAM in a pair of ours and STILLS!!

/sbin/sysctl -w vm.swappiness=100

That was the solution!!
now the kernel prefers to swap processes on the swap partition
and the system doesn't freeze

[Fintan]

Re: HELP!!! Kubuntu FILLS MY RAM in a pair of ours and STILLS!!

/sbin/sysctl -w vm.swappiness=100

I am having a similar problem. Out of curiosity, what does: /sbin/sysctl -w vm.swappiness=100 mean and do?

Thank you for your feedback
Fintan

[GameManK]

Re: HELP!!! Kubuntu FILLS MY RAM in a pair of ours and STILLS!!

All your memory SHOULD be being used. Read up on how Linux allocates memory, there are lots of articles around. Here's the first one I got off google: http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/softwar.../free-mem.html

That command causes the kernel to use swap as much as possible. As it says, "swappiness". 0 means it uses swap as little as possible.

Your system freezing is being caused by something other than the memory being used up. Try checking your memory hardware by running memtest86 (one of the choices in the boot menu).

[javierrivera]

Re: HELP!!! Kubuntu FILLS MY RAM in a pair of ours and STILLS!!

Swappiness is used to fine tuning the machine performance. Setting it to 100 will mean that the machine will swap unused apps to the hard disk, so more memory is available as buffers and cache.

It's should not be related to machine freezes. Most of the linux machines out there don't have a 100 swappiness and they don't freeze.

Hapo: It's very likely that you have a bad memory module. High swapiness will make the freezes that are caused by bad memory more rare (as it decreased memory used by apps). You should probably run a memory test on your computer to be sure.

Javier.