I've discovered recently that something on my Centos 5.8 box (up to date) is hogging a ton of RAM.
so a little while ago I sat and watched top for a while. it showed (sorry, I didn't take screen shots or write this down, so the numbers are a bit rough) that out of 8 gigs of swap, around 2 1/2 was in use, and all the RAM (except for the little the kernel keeps for itself) was in use (it's got 4 gigs).
this might not sound bad, but there's hardly ever anything big running on this box, it's just my home desktop machine used mostly for web browsing/music/email and similar.
so, watching top run for a while I could eventually make out that something had "1.6g" flashing in the "RES" column. slowing the refresh a little I saw that it was "clock applet". so I killed the clock applet and restarted it, then clock applet showed "11m" in the "RES" column, and the unused RAM was suddenly like a gig and 3/4, or so, and the swap used slowly started dropping while the free ram began being used up, as it normally should.
as I continue to watch it run (10-15 mins later) I can see that clock applet is now showing 14m in the RES column, so it's still growing.
Is anyone else seeing the clock applet hogging (tons of tiny leaks, I assume) RAM needlessly?