Memory Issue

Robert Rawlins - Think Blue robert.rawlins at thinkbluemedia.co.uk
Sun Feb 17 10:20:29 EST 2008


Afternoon Guys,

 

I've got what I would consider to be a strange memory leak within an
application I've been working on. When the application is running the
consumed system memory creeps up slowly, getting higher and higher.

 

However, when looking at 'top' to display the memory allocation for all the
applications, the actual assigned memory to the 'python' process doesn't
appear to change, it consistently looks like:

 

2414 root      20   0  9516 6316 3148 S  0.0  2.5   0:03.62 python

 

However the currently used memory for the entire system, shown here:

 

Mem:    256760k total,    35588k used,   221172k free,     2096k buffers

 

Continues to escalate until the system runs out of memory. I can be pretty
sure that this is something to do with my application as whenever the app
isn't running then the memory usage doesn't increase.

 

An additional strangeness to this is that when my application is killed, the
memory doesn't drop back down again? Is that normal? My understanding of a
memory leak was that when the application dies the memory will be freed back
up again.

 

Can any offer any suggestions as to what is causing this problem? Is it
perhaps not my actual application but something I'm calling from within it?

 

Cheers,

 

Robert

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