Comment 2 for bug 432531

Revision history for this message
Vancouverite (sethgilchrist) wrote :

This bug affects me too. I posted about this on the ubuntu forums many months ago and got a "linux memory use is different from what you are used to" except that linux is really all I'm used to.

If I examine 'free', 'top', 'htop', system monitor, '/proc/meminfo', etc, they all say that I'm using about 2 GB (NOT including buffers or cache, with those it tops 3.3 GB). However, when I print 'ps aux' to a file and add up all the memory listed in there it only comes to 950 MB. So where has the rest gone?

I am running a fresh (within 24 hrs), up-to-date Karmic official release install and this really bums me out! I was hoping that the problem would vanish when I up graded to 9.10. I had the same issue in Jaunty.

I have attached the output of 'cat /proc/meminfo', 'free -t' and 'ps aux'. I imported the ps_aux data into OOCalc and added up all the process memory and it came to 25% or 993 MB. Free shows nearly 2 GB in use (3.3 GB with buffers).

Karmic 64 bit
Lenovo T400
4 GB RAM
ATI Discreet graphics with fglrx driver (note: when I had this problem in 9.04, I was using integrated intel graphics)