this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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How to diagnose severe memory leaks when processes list look normal? (lemmy.world)
submitted 6 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) by that_leaflet@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
15 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I've been running into an issue recently where my system will start to stutter and freeze. Going into my task manager (Resources), I can see my using is using roughly 18/32GB of RAM despite closing all apps. Normally I should be at around 2GB on a fresh boot.

I've only noticed this issue appearing when first interacting with an app called Newsflash, but the issue persists even after closing the app. I even tried using systemd's soft-reboot feature and even that did not clear the memory leak. So it seems the memory leak must be in the kernel itself.

And please don't link linuxatemyram. This is not related to cached data.

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[–] gnuhaut@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago

Probably this but seems like a pain to use:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/dev-tools/kmemleak.html

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

If you had something hog memory and a lot of other stuff got paged out of ram as a result, that can slow things down. Try running "top" and see how much swap space is in use. If it's more than a little bit, once you have enough memory available by shutting off whatever was hogging it, try "swapoff" (pages the stuff back in, which can take a little while) followed by "swapon" to re-enable swap.

[–] SavvyBeardedFish@reddthat.com 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Are you by chance using an integrated GPU?

Noticed that my AMD Radeon 680M uses quite a lot of RAM as shared memory.

Using something like amdgpu_top will show how much RAM your iGPU is using, metric is 'GTT'

[–] that_leaflet@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

No integrated GPU.

[–] taiidan@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Stop using Newsflash or submit a bug report?

[–] that_leaflet@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

I'm not sure if it is related to Newsflash is the problem. Besides, I've been using the same version for months, but this has only recently become a problem. And the problem persists after Newsflash is closed.

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

I don't know what this tool is or how it gets its "memory" metric. If you want to continue to use it, please ascertain that these values correspond to RSS by cross checking with i.e. ps aux. RSS is the memory exclusively held by a given process which is typically what mean by the "memory usage" of any given process. Note however that this does not count anonymous pages of a process that are swapped or shared with other processes.

Going into my task manager (Resources), I can see my using is using roughly 18/32GB of RAM despite closing all apps.

This does not tell you (or us for that matter) anything without defining what "using" means here. My system is "using" 77% of RAM right now but 45% of memory is available for use because it's cached.

Please post the output of free -h aswell as swapon.

Next, please post the contents of /proc/meminfo.

Do you use ZFS?

[–] that_leaflet@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Resources reports the same memory usage as btop. free tells me only 6GB is being used for cache.

On a fresh boot, Resources and btop report less than 2GB RAM usage, obviously not including cached stuff. So for both tools to report 18GB with no apps open, it’s strange.

ps aux looks all normal, nothing in the background using more than 1% of RAM.

Using Fedora Silverblue 41 with btrfs.

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 1 points 51 minutes ago

If you're not going to post what I asked for, nobody can help you.

[–] akash_rawal@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Check if there's any large file in /tmp and /run/user/*?

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Or just generally df -h | grep tmpfs and look for any significant usage.

[–] that_leaflet@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

All normal

[–] that_leaflet@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

No large files.

[–] xpsking@lemmy.world -2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Kill a program with -9 and debug the core dump maybe?

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 hours ago

That doesn't make any sort of sense in this scenario.