My computer is been up for 24 hours now. SeaMonkey is running as well as two instances of mrxvt and one instance of leafpad. I'm using 87 MB of RAM to do all this, which is typical.
I do NOT see any examples of people using free to make diagnostic decisions. You don't even have free, you have a symlink to a busy box cut down worthless simulation of the real free and the results you are getting is causing misinformation and confusion.
Yes your memory is going to increase and increase and increase some more. But why? Linux buffers and
caches.
And those caches and buffers must be subtracted and I don't see this happening in these threads.
As far as SeaMonkey memory leaks, how about factoring in its memory cache? I think this is appropriate.
about:cache and then see how much is in memory cache (as well as disk cache if you want).
Then calculate how much memory SeaMonkey is really using for running and how much for caching.
If you all factor in Linux's caching and SeaMonkey's caching
which is very simple to do, then and only if then the math doesn't add up, consider memory leaks or other problems. Just don't overlook the very obvious.
Here is the real free output. And by the way, the real free has the -m switch (as well as other options) to display in megabytes which is used in the example below.
Code: Select all
[~] free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2535 990 1544 0 3 899
-/+ buffers/cache: 87 2447
Swap: 541 0 541
[~]
If anyone wants the honest to goodness free utility download it here, package put together by me.
The real thing
Sorry, for my irritation, it's based on Puppy even coming with a utility that does little more than confuse. Busybox is fine for a lot of things, but not all things and especially not as a free substitute.
I hope you enjoy the utility, because it really will help you in your diagnosis.
Put free in /bin and overwrite the symlink
Put the lib file in /lib