Subject: All my memory disappears, rather too quickly ....

From: Jeppe Sigbrandt <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 1996 15:35:27 +0100 (BST)

Hi World,

I wrote earlier about the system crashes I was experiencing.
These often happen when using X and several times when pushing
the same button in mailtool.

However, it seems the above is unrelated, for I've been 
keeping an eye on top recently and it shows the system
runs out of memory quite dramatically.

My 16 MB swap partition fills up within a day and presumably
halts the computer (when using X).  Recently I've had to resort
to using non-x applications, and since the last reboot I may not
even have started X.  However the swap is full, and its only been
2 days. (using irc, zless, elm, lynx, vi)

Of course I could increase the size of my swap partition (inconvenient)
but I don't think this is the solution.  There must be something
else going on.  (with linux 1.2.13 on this 8MB machine, I could
leave it running for days on end without ever exiting X, and had
uptimes of around 5 months).

However, with debian I've started using NIS, mostly in order to 
be able to keep my home dirs in sync easily.  Sometimes 
sendmail shows up as using a lot of memory resources, and xterms
have been known to use 10% memory or more !!!

At the moment though, no one process seems to use much in the way
of resources, but top reports that there is only a measly 180 K
left.  In swap.  !!!

I tried to de-install sendmail, but dselect would have none of it
due to dependency problems.  dpkg, might accept the deinstall using
the force options but I haven't dared yet.  I don't need sendmail
since /var/spool/mail is nfs mounted from a server onto my machine.

And if NIS could be causing all of this havoc, I don't mind doing
without it either.

BTW:  my machine runs much slower now than under slackware 2-2.
and its never been fast due to the 8MB memory limitation.

These probs may all be unrelated to each other, but then again
maybe not. If there is any info I should be supplying which I
haven't, I'm sorry.  But the problem seems rather abstract ...

Thanks for your attention,
jay