How Red Hat Linux 6.0 handles memory. To me it looks like a disaster

["bis" <bis@gateway.net>]

 Dear Linux Team,

 I have little hope that somebody will be so kind to answer but I have
unpleasant experience with memory
using 2.2.5-15smp Kernel. Red Hat Linux 6.0.

Whatever I do my free memory always shrinks.
I have around 1GB of memory. Everything works
looked fine. But then I found unpleasant surprise.
I run large program (which fits into RAM nicely)
and then run

 free or vmstat

 I always observe reduction on memory. I also run
Apache on the machine. If I try to retrieve a page
from my website on that machine I always loose
memory. It goes in to cash or shared memory but
free memory ALWAYS SHRINKS. And I don't understand why. I think the only
possible explanation
is kernel behavior. To me it's absolutely unsatisfactory. Sometimes during
HTML page retrieval
(just when I click a browser) it reduces by 200 KB.
Hardly believable? But it's true. And it's reproducible.
Sometimes it reduces only by 4 KB. But whatever
I do it always shrinks. At the same time I planned
to run two big programs in parallel which consume
300-400 M of memory. However, after each run I always get 30-40 M reduction
in free memory. (From
my point of view free memory is maximum memory
you can allocate from you program). This situation
looks pretty much disastrous since rather quickly
when the memory will be as low as 700M the system
will start swapping and will further reduce free memory
in the system. I observe all this already for 4 months.
And I don't like it. Even if I run something pretty small
I still get effective memory reduction.

 I find all this highly unsatisfactory. And I don't understand why people
consider kernel 2.2.5-15smp
as being stable. I understand that there perhaps a certain algorithm in
kernel which redistributes the
memory. But I don't like this behavior I can hardly
do anything about it. The loss of memory accessible
from the programs diminishes very rapidly. Sometimes
10-20 M per day. Though my machine is almost empty.
And it's not clear whether it's possible or not to stop
this process. Maybe it will stabilize maybe not. Maybe
I will be forced to reboot every day... I don't understand why people are so
happy about latest versions of Linux... Could you do something about it?
For me all this is just equivalent to a huge memory
leak. Could you please tell me what shall I do?
My system was installed by Dell (as well as Apache)
and everything appears to run smoothly but this
problem with memory makes me really sick.

 Could please improve the kernel or give me some
explanation of what is going on? If I don't reboot
my machine for a month I easily me loose 150M or
more of memory. I agree with you that this is probably
not a real memory leak... But my inability to influence
distribution of memory by kernel makes me helpless.

Could someone give at least a hint of what is going
on? I would be very grateful to that person.

 Regards, Boris


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