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bbfa235
(Get the code!)
I discovered an interesting behavior last night. If I let the memory get really high, then start the program ParaView (compiled from source www.paraview.org), even if I don't do anything - literally start it and quit it - the captured memory is released.
To display this I played Freedoom for about an hour and when I quit that I was using 1.7 GB memory with just the desktop open. I saved the output of 'ps aux' and 'free' and then started and quit ParaView as soon as it was loaded. Low and behold, 800 MB of memory spontaneously freed up! I saved the output of the same commands immediately.
I inspected the process list in each case and there were no differences between the two, so wherever that memory was tied up it was not accounted for in the process tree.
I don't know enough about this stuff to even postulate on what is going on, but in my view this represents a fairly serious bug. Is there another place I should look for where this memory may be accounted?