I’m personally barely beginning my investigation into what I believe might be memory leaks in my system as well (I’ve only been running 11.3 for a little over a month like most everyone else which IMO is likely too soon to truly recognize any possible leaking unless it’s very obvious).
A personal opinion on DenverD’s reference links regarding the supposed difference between Linux and Windows… is that although they may be informative regarding what Linux does, they’re wildly false describing what happens in Windows at least for several generations of OS which may explain to some degree the skepticism of some of the posters in those threads. Since those references are all relatively recent (< 3 years) I’m disappointed in the accuracy of some of the statements which could be important to properly understanding and comparing one technology vs another.
At least since Vista and also mostly in XP, memory management is similar to the memory management model described as “Linux” – There is less emphasis on sending to garbage collection processes that are and have been inactive so that if re-invoked the resource might not have to be re-allocated. If you also want to consider the managed application environments that might run on top of Windows like .NET and Java, this is even more the case than native Windows applications and would similarly affect any description of Java and Mono applications running on Linux.
But, just because the general description of how the memory models work are relatively similar does not mean that in practice both memory models will perform in any way similarly.
There do seem to be at least some clear differences, as noted by one poster like the fact that Windows will write some data to swap regardless whether memory usage is full or not, recognizing that the User Experience can be improved by pushing to the background data and processes that aren’t time sensitive. If Linux doesn’t do something similar (In which I would be surprised), that in itself can affect responsiveness.
Also, at least for the referenced links I feel that they only very coarsely describe a memory model when how well memory management performs is really in the details which would be far beyond the scope of general discourse, is in the realm of high level mathematical algorithms, rulesets that ever try to predict User and machine behavior (and needs).
Maybe the correct answer for the general public which memory models works better is “It Depends.” If you’re looking for a clear technical claim that one is better than the other, it probably doesn’t exist, the only thing that can be said truthfully is that Linux and Windows are different and if you want to know what works better for you, you just have to try each and compare for yourself.
Now, as for whether memory is leaking, IMO it might be useful to define what a memory leak is and how it likely has little to do with OS memory management(Although possible, I suspect nowadays most memory leaks are due to application code).
In general a memory leak is where a memory resource has been used and isn’t garbage collected (expired) so that the resource becomes available again.
This would clearly be the case if the same process which originally utilized the memory resource is re-invoked and is allocated new resources instead of utilizing the previous resource, and the original resource never becomes available for use by another process. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen this kind of error by the OS, nowadays I usually see this because the application doesn’t ever signal the resource is no longer needed. Eventually memory resources become exhausted and responsiveness slows.
Note that is not the same as simply not expiring resources in a timely manner which can cause slow responsiveness as the Memory Manager attempts to re-allocate resources on demand (instead for instance during low demand), so has nothing to do with things like the Swap File, and is usually identified by running something like top or ps periodically to view the amount of memory allocated periodically (note this may still be an incomplete picture).
Comment and Criticism Expected 
,
Tony
