Memory is not released

[ClaudiaAmado]

Hello everybody!

Something very weird is happening in my C8000 HP-UX 11.11.
Monitoring the system using top or nice top, I can see that the "memory free" is always decreasing. I do need to reboot my system almost each 2 days.
As far as I could analyze, no processes were hung.
I could not find out what's going on.
Any ideas?
Thank you very very much!

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Top is a rather useless tool to monotor memory usage in a machine; it only measures the amount of memory assocaited with processes and even that is very difficult to do because the same shared library functions and even the same executables might be shared by many processes yet that memory use should only count as 1 for the system itself.

What you should do is something like:
UNIX95=1 ps -o vsz,pid,comm
as a cronjob and log the output to a file.

If you see the same process growing (the vsz) column over time then you probably have a memory leak and the answer is to fix the code. You should note that some processes grow over time normally until some equibrium value is reached (or a system limit is reached).