I was wondering why my memory useage was so high, what is this thing that take a whopping 1.2GB of memory.
Please and thank you.
Ubuntu – what is the nm-applet and why does it take so much memory
default-programsmemorymemory usage
Related Solutions
You are reading the output of free incorrectly. The Linux Kernel does a lot of its own memory management, in turn allocating more than it actually needs - so your true amount of "Free Memory" is 3044 located in the "Free" column of the +/- Buffers/cache line, making only 780 MB actually being consumed.
By default top will sort based on CPU consumption. You can press Shift+M to sort by percentage of memory consumed - giving you a better grasp of what software is using the memory allotted to the kernel.
free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7873 3916 3956 0 231 1117
-/+ buffers/cache: 2567 5305
Swap: 12401 0 12401
And in top with memory sorted:
top - 17:05:18 up 2 days, 1:40, 4 users, load average: 0.21, 0.14, 0.11
Tasks: 237 total, 1 running, 234 sleeping, 0 stopped, 2 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.6%us, 0.8%sy, 0.1%ni, 96.7%id, 0.8%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 8062420k total, 4013632k used, 4048788k free, 237204k buffers
Swap: 12699644k total, 292k used, 12699352k free, 1144752k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1632 root 20 0 884m 240m 6532 S 0 3.1 1:20.17 java
3911 marco 20 0 1011m 165m 22m S 0 2.1 9:20.62 chrome
3852 marco 20 0 770m 162m 45m S 0 2.1 14:59.59 chrome
1091 root 20 0 491m 160m 118m S 3 2.0 29:19.44 Xorg
1747 marco 20 0 659m 108m 34m S 1 1.4 18:43.92 compiz
3964 marco 20 0 1113m 99m 21m S 0 1.3 18:51.88 chrome
1759 marco 20 0 668m 94m 21m S 0 1.2 2:27.42 nautilus
3046 marco 20 0 788m 86m 26m S 0 1.1 1:22.96 evolution
1793 marco 20 0 647m 85m 18m S 0 1.1 0:12.74 shutter
1791 marco 20 0 404m 85m 13m S 0 1.1 5:19.51 bitcoin
2938 marco 20 0 809m 78m 31m S 0 1.0 1:01.07 empathy
9630 marco 20 0 265m 73m 19m S 1 0.9 12:41.52 skype
9618 marco 20 0 914m 64m 21m S 0 0.8 1:14.04 chrome
1777 marco 20 0 432m 64m 14m S 0 0.8 1:45.96 pastie
Finally to help you diagnose what the actual software is, try passing the -c flag to top: top -c as that will give you the full path, name, and parameters of the command running.
I'm trying to understand which of the processes eat the most memory.
That's simple: ruby!
when you add up the %MEM values, it goes to about 50-60% only
Actually, adding up the columns as shown gives 69.2%.
As Samik has noted, that certainly does not include all the processes on your system - try pastebinning the output of
top -b -n 1to get the full output in a file and to share it with us so we can help you better.Also, the kernel takes up some amount of memory, and some kinds of VPS (e.g. Xen, KVM) will reserve some additional memory upon boot for their internal use. Pastebin the output of
dmesgtoo.
For better metrics and ease-of-use, I recommend you use htop instead of top, with the "Hide userland threads" option enabled:
Also look at memtop:
Best Answer
I experienced the same on my 12.04 installation. After a little research it appeared that it was just a GUI component (representing the icon in the status bar), and killing it will not affect the network connections.
SO I killed it and launched a new one from my terminal. Resource manager showed an immediate drop of 1.5 GB of RAM consumption.