Ubuntu – Memory runs full over time, high “buffer/cache” usage, low “available” memory

The "memory used by a process" is not a clear cut concept in modern operating systems. What can be measured is the size of the address space of the process (SIZE) and resident set size (RSS, how many of the pages in the address space are currently in memory). Part of RSS is shared (most processes in memory share one copy of glibc, and so for assorted other shared libraries; several processes running the same executable share it, processes forked share read-only data and possibly a chunk of not-yet-modified read-write data with the parent). On the other hand, memory used for the process by the kernel isn't accounted for, like page tables, kernel buffers, and kernel stack. In the overall picture you have to account for the memory reserved for the graphics card, the kernel's use, and assorted "holes" reserved for DOS and other prehistoric systems (that isn't much, anyway).

The only way of getting an overall picture is what the kernel reports as such. Adding up numbers with unknown overlaps and unknown left outs is a nice exercise in arithmetic, nothing more.

Seeing another of your post I guess you are using zram. So that will be my assumption here.

I did the experience to install zram and consume lot of memory, and I got the same output of smem than you. smem does not take into account zram into its counting, it only uses /proc/meminfo to compute its value, and if you look and try to understand the code you will see that the zram RAM occupation is gets in the end counted under the noncache column of the kernel dynamic memory line.

Further investigations

Following my gut feeling that zram was behind this behavious, I setted up a VM with similar spec as your machine: 4 GB RAM and 2 GB zram swap, no swap file.

I have loaded the VM with heavy weight applications and got the following state:

huygens@ubuntu:~$ smem -wt -K ~/vmlinuz-3.2.0-38-generic.unpacked -R 4096M
Area                           Used      Cache   Noncache 
firmware/hardware            130717          0     130717 
kernel image                  13951          0      13951 
kernel dynamic memory       1063520     922172     141348 
userspace memory            2534684     257136    2277548 
free memory                  451432     451432          0 
----------------------------------------------------------
                            4194304    1630740    2563564 
huygens@ubuntu:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3954       3528        426          0         79        858
-/+ buffers/cache:       2589       1365
Swap:         1977          0       1977

As you can see free reports 858 MB cache memory and that is also what smem seems to report within the cached kernel dynamic memory.

Then I further stressed the system using Chromium Browser. At the beginning, it was only have 83 MB of swap used. But then after a few more tabs opened, the swap switch quickly to almost it's maximum and I experienced OOM! zram has really a dangerous side where wrongly configured (too big sizes) it can quickly hit you back like a trebuchet-like mechanism.

At that time I had the following outputs:

huygens@ubuntu:~$ smem -wt -K ~/vmlinuz-3.2.0-38-generic.unpacked -R 4096M
Area                           Used      Cache   Noncache 
firmware/hardware            130717          0     130717 
kernel image                  13951          0      13951 
kernel dynamic memory       1355344     124072    1231272 
userspace memory             961004      36456     924548 
free memory                 1733288    1733288          0 
----------------------------------------------------------
                            4194304    1893816    2300488 
huygens@ubuntu:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3954       2256       1698          0          4        132
-/+ buffers/cache:       2118       1835
Swap:         1977       1750        227

See how the kernel dynamic memory (columns cache and non-cache) look like inverted? It is because in the first case, the kernel had "cached" memory such as reported by free but then it had swap memory held by zram which smem does not know how to compute (check smem source code, zram occupation is not reported in /proc/meminfo, this it is not computed by smem which does simple "total kernel mem" - "type of memory reported by meminfo that I know are cache", what it does not know is that in the computed total kernel mem it has added the size of the swap which is in RAM!)

When I was in this state, I activated a hard disk swap and turned off the zram swap and I reset the zram devices: echo 1 > /sys/block/zram0/reset.

After that the noncache kernel memory melted like snow in summer and returned to "normal" value.

Conclusion

smem does not know about zram (yet) maybe because it is still staging and thus not part of /proc/meminfo which reports global parameters (like (in)active pages size, total memory) and then only report on a few specific parameters. smem identified a few of this specific parameters as "cache", sum them up and compare that to total memory. Because of that zram used memory gets counted in the noncache column.

Note: by the way, in modern kernel, meminfo reports also the shared memory consumed. smem does not take that yet into account, so even without zram the output of smem is to consider carefully esp. if you use application that make big use of shared memory.

References used:

• smem source code
• zram official documentation
• /proc/meminfo explained (though would need an update)
• source code of meminfo output