- This topic has 0 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated Dec 31-6:49 pm by wildstar84.
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wildstar84
I finally rebooted my computer and router this morning after over a month (and numerous upgrades) and to my horror, discovered that both were using around DOUBLE the memory! I checked all the usual suspects (htop, lsmod, ps ax, kernel, etc.) to little avail (I could only account for a/b 10% of it). I decided to look at /proc/meminfo for a little more detail & still couldn’t account for it. Finally, I booted up an old hard drive that hadn’t been updated in several months (a “backup” system which still showed half the memory usage) so I could do some more comparisens by looking at it’s /proc/meminfo, which turned out to still be very close to my current setup. I then began to suspect the “free” command (which was what was sounding this alarm) and discovered that I had upgraded it’s package (procps) twice since previous boot (from v2:3.3.17-7.1nosystemd to v2.4.0.2.3.0nosystemd), viewed the changelog and found this little tidbit:
procps (2:4.0.2-1) unstable; urgency=medium free: Used field is now Total - AvailableComparing the corresponding /proc/meminfo values from the current & last-known “good” boots I realized that both calculated this way were very close to what the current boot showed (the doubled-ish value), so apparently, I’ve been “using” quite a bit more memory than I thought but free wasn’t calculating it the way it is now. So, if you (like me) stumble upon this and panic, thinking you have a rootkit or bad kernel/app.) there appears to be no need – your kernel, libs, apps, etc. have likely NOT exploded in size!
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