Memory loss after long uptime

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Rick Stevens <ricks at alldigital.com> said:
> You might try having a look at the output of ipcs after stopping MySQL
> and see if your missing memory is in one or more of the shm segments.
> If so, you can reclaim it by using "ipcrm -m <shmid>". You'd be
> surprised at how many programs don't release IPC resources--especially
> if they are rudely terminated (e.g. SIGSEGV or SIGKILL).

Are you sure?  I've been running MySQL for a long time, and I don't
remember it ever using SysV IPC.  I certainly don't see it using that
now, even on an old version I still have running (much older than the
OP's F14).

To the OP: if you think you are seeing RAM in use that isn't reflected
when comparing the output of "free" to "ps"/"top" process usage, it
could be in other kernel buffers.  Check out "slabtop" (has to run as
root); there are other kernel caches that "free" doesn't know about,
especially the dentry and inode caches.  These will show up as just more
kernel RAM in use, but really they are caches that should be discarded
as needed (just like the old buffers/cache lines in "free").
-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.