who's eating my RAM?

invalid.TakeThisOut@domain.invalid wrote:
> yes but don't you have to have suspect(s)?

No, in lack of more information I have no suspects among your programs.

> Nothing is running except X and a few startup services! Top shows very
> little memory in use.

My only suspect is you, that you have forgotten some memory hungry
program that you started. At one occasion you reported that free (and also
conky) said that 1151928 bytes were used by programs while "nothing is
running". At another occasion you said that you should use "M" in top to
check which of your processes takes the most memory. However, so far I
haven't seen any output from any program that verifies your claim that you
have "no running programs using much memory".

When you you are in a situation where you think that "someone is eating
your RAM", please post the output from the following four commands:

free
(to show RAM usage)

ps -aux | wc
(to show number of running processes)

ps -aux --sort=vsz
(to show your processes and sort them by memory usage)

ipcs
(to show any shared memory used for ipc)

regards Henrik
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