On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 20:02 -0300, Rodrigo Barbosa wrote:
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On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 06:45:10PM -0400, William L. Maltby wrote:
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Mem: 775708k total, 764752k used, 10956k free, 60780k buffers Swap: 1572856k total, 160k used, 1572696k free, 377324k cached
PID VIRT RES SHR %MEM SWAP COMMAND 24729 127m 32m 15m 4.3 94m evolution 3409 97220 5268 4304 0.7 89m evolution-data- 2851 115m 36m 7120 4.8 79m X 3359 19904 6128 5316 0.8 13m gnome-volume-ma
(...)
3355 14768 7524 5984 1.0 7244 metacity 7182 10328 3436 2280 0.4 6892 sendmail 18501 11080 4248 1912 0.5 6832 cupsd
Note that the summary line says 160k of swap is used. The man pages say the summary and the details under "SWAP" are both reported in "k". No mention of "m" is made, I presume that it means "megabytes"?
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Now, if I treat all those numbers ending in "m" as megabytes, it doesn't take long to see that I've been lied to somewhere along the way. Or alternatively, I'm dense and "Just Don't Get It" (TM).
Any help?
I can see two possible explanations for this. Maybe both in conjunction.
One is that you get getting multiple entries for the same processes, but different threads. That used to be the way of it up until .. humm, not sure ... 2.4, I guess. Not sure exactly how it works these days. I would have to check.
The other is the overcommit kernel feature. It is possible the kernel is overcommiting memory, and thus showing more than it really in use.
One last thing possible (just thought about it) is that top is adding more than one namespace to those totals. Maybe shared memory (/dev/shm ?). Or any other possible namespace.
I agree it does seem odd, and I have seen this kind of stuff happening before. Once I started hunting it down, and found the reason for it. It was some time ago (2.2 ? 2.4 ? Not sure), so I'm reasonably sure it is not the same reason these days. But I hope I gave you are least some pointers for where to start looking.
Would I be correct if I summarized as "Looks like a bug, and possibly a regression that you had seen before"? I think then I'll first start by seeing if there is an open bug somewhere. I hate having to chase code right now as I'm trying to improve my knowledge and use of sendmail, DNS, ... and a whole host of other things that flew by me over the years. <*sigh*>
Anyhow, thanks for getting back to me. I'm going to try to work investigation of this in with the other things I've got going.
Rodrigo Barbosa rodrigob@suespammers.org
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