memory going down, cached unflushed with a system in a 100%idle state

memory going down, cached unflushed with a system in a 100%idle state

[RichardR]

hi all
I have a SUN v20z running with RHEL/WS3 with kernel 2.4.21-20.ELsmp
and I have this freaky problem about memory running out when I ran
unix processes. I just dont know if there are related in the problem.
our server is running in a production mode, and we have many "ssh",
"screen" running at the same time on the same machine. we also have
nfs access disk. what I can't understand is that the cached memory is
still increasing when i ran under init level 3 getting rid of useless
processes... as you can see the "ps auwwx" below, we just have 400kB
used by the kernel and we have 4GB memory !!

[root@katy root]#  ps auwwx | sort -n +4 | grep -v sort | awk
'BEGIN{a=0;b=0}{a+=$5;b+=$6}END{print "VSZ=",a,"RSS=",b}'
VSZ= 468392 RSS= 35140

[root@katy root]# free;cat /proc/meminfo
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3992872    3680732     312140          0     177680    3100764
-/+ buffers/cache:     402288    3590584
Swap:      2096472       3860    2092612
        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  4088700928 3769069568 319631360        0 181944320 3178291200
Swap: 2146787328  3952640 2142834688
MemTotal:      3992872 kB
MemFree:        312140 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:        177680 kB
Cached:        3100764 kB
SwapCached:       3036 kB
Active:        2471260 kB
ActiveAnon:       6492 kB
ActiveCache:   2464768 kB
Inact_dirty:    605604 kB
Inact_laundry:  131072 kB
Inact_clean:     78340 kB
Inact_target:   657252 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:      3992872 kB
LowFree:        312140 kB
SwapTotal:     2096472 kB
SwapFree:      2092612 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
Hugepagesize:     2048 kB

Thanks for your help guys.
Cheers,
-- 
Richard R.
IT Soft/System Engineer
CNRS/IN2P3/LPNHE 
Jussieu - Paris VI
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