[12.3 x86_64] out of memory/RAM fragmentation

Hello all, after installing suse 12.3 64bit I went into a number of problems and have solved them all but one.

I regularly run Thunderbird, Firefox with 5-10 tabs (including flash content), shell, mc, image viewer, Eclipse, Amarok, Blender3D, etc… all at the same time…
Now fun comes, when I close some of them or all of them and try to open something else, it just wont start sometimes giving a simple error popup (could not start). After that even the recently closed applications cannot start giving the same error.

I have 8Gig of physical RAM installed checked periodically with memtest and no errors found. My swap partition is ~4Gigs. Programs like free, top, htop, Kinfocenter, etc report in all combinations of programs run that I have 99-96% swap free, Application RAM usage 30-45%, Disk cache the rest of free ram minus 2-20% (as expected). When Free Physical memory goes below 1% that is when problems start.

I close all programs i can and run

sync; echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

My free physical ram goes up to 80-85% but I cant run anything :frowning:
I have to Log out and log back in again to make things work again…
It happens with KDE4 (v4.10.5 r1) and with Xfce (v4.10)… I run only the bare minimum plasmoids

Last time I had similar issues was with my Amiga Chip RAM fragmentation…

My system and repos are uptodate

Linux 3.7.10-1.16-desktop x86_64 | 2-thr Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8500 3166MHz | Load: 0.25 Tasks: 489 | Mem: 2437/8001MB 

I have 2 ATI cards HD5xxx (proprietary drivers) with 3 monitors attached (left is screen 1, center and right is screen 0 with one big desktop)

Please help me find the leak here!..

Since 8 GB is more than enough, it must be your video system. Do you know if the proprietary video driver would work with kernel 3.9 by chance? Up to 3.9.11 now, it is what I would give a try first. Also, while early in the game, the next kernel 3.11 will have many fixes in its AMD open source driver you will want to try out as I understand it. For kernel upgrades, have a look on my bog on the subject of kernels here:

openSUSE and Installing New Linux Kernel Versions - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

Thank You,

I had the same issue long before installing the proprietary drivers and dual GFX cards… I just left the ram problem as last, because at the time I only had 4Gig of RAM installed and thought that doubling it would solve this prob… it didn’t. So I don’t think it is a driver or xorg problem… :frowning:

Try creating a new user temporarily. If this problem does not occur for that user, it might be a problem in configuration somewhere in your home folder. I have heard of issues like this before, but I can not seem to find the information about how to fix it.

Hello, sorry for the delay of responding this, but for the last few weeks I have been testing various configurations and settings as both jdmcdaniel3 and nightwishfan have triggered some interesting facts and pointed me to a certain direction of account/kernel combo.

Yes a new user account does not have this memory leak using various programs at the same time, and I have managed so far to stabilize my old (problematic) account. I will dig into it for a couple of weeks more to find who/what/how causes it and post it here…

UPD… memory problems continued in various configurations/users/etc up until December… No or very little use of swap memory, and after some time of use (usually around 1 hour) new applications could not be launched, even if I had closed/killed + burned all other applications running…

I had to log out and log back in, KDE, Xfce, Gnome, other/new account, didn’t matter… always the same story up until one of the last automatic updates done by my system during Christmas time…

Very happy up until now… rotfl!.. Swap memory works as it should, I can launch/kill relaunch applications at will, and dont have to bother login/out every now and then anymore >:)… although I would like to know what caused it… :\

On 2014-01-10 19:36, nixboom wrote:

> Very happy up until now… rotfl!.. Swap memory works as it should, I
> can launch/kill relaunch applications at will, and dont have to bother
> login/out every now and then anymore >:)… although I would like to
> know what caused it… :\

There was a kernel update for 12.3 this December. There is a list of
things done on each patch somewhere… Right now I don’t remember how to
get it. zypper or rpm command, perhaps.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

A FYI
I posted this article on my Wiki because although the Free tool to view memory usage and resources is deceptively easy, more often than not people will <read it wrong> so you likely have a lot less available free memory than you might think
http://en.opensuse.org/User:Tsu2/free_tool

NOTE - In my post, you’re given the command to clear memory buffers and cache so you can free up resources without rebooting.
Also, although less useful, I’ve also given you the command to move swapped memory back into real memory if that is causing disk thrashing.

If you want to track down what app or process is using up RAM, run top or htop from the CLI and/or the process/application manager for your Desktop.

HTH,
TSU

Just out of curiosity, was wondering why you posted about RAM fragmentation in your subject line…

Although RAM fragmentation actually exists, it’s not something a typical User would have any knowledge of. Disk fragmentation of course is well known.

TSU

On 01/15/2014 10:36 AM, tsu2 wrote:
>
> Just out of curiosity, was wondering why you posted about RAM
> fragmentation in your subject line…
>
> Although RAM fragmentation actually exists, it’s not something a typical
> User would have any knowledge of. Disk fragmentation of course is well
> known.

Most people learn of memory fragmentation when they get a log splat that a
kernel memory request of high order failed. I have seen the case where a badly
written driver requested O(6) memory (256KB). Pieces of this size are usually
not available for very long after a reboot. The available fragments are listed
in the resulting dump. That only occurs for physical memory that must be
contiguous because it might be used for DMA buffers, etc.