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Viktor Joras
Asked: 2018-01-10 09:16:10 +0800 CST

Linux is eating my RAM

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This is not yet another question about missing RAM because of buffers/caches. I know what buffers and caches are and I know I can purge them this easy:

sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches.

I have upgraded Debian 8 to Debian 9 and now after the first reboot the available memory is disappearing second after second in real time till reaching 0 and the system behaviour is so bizzare I'm forced to reboot.

top and htop commands with 'M' sorting don't help since they show only innocent processes that take 0.3% of memory. So what is eating my RAM? If it is not disk caches and processes what else could it be? Is it possible that there are no tools for Linux that show me exactly what is going on with my RAM?

I'm running Debian 9 with 32GB RAM.

debian

1 Answers

  1. Solved. When looking for memory usage with top or htop don't look for the %MEM column but look for the RES column instead. This is the true memory parameter that counts.

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