On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 03:43:48AM -0700, J. Blank - NetBSD Mailing Lists wrote:
> I have a nice ThinkPad 360CE (I think). I am a relative newbie to NetBSD 
> and I am unsure of what is eating my memory. It seems like processes 
> with PIDs 2 through 8 (presumably spawned by init?) are, together, 
> gobbling 12MB of my 20MB of RAM (WTF???).
> 
> Here is the output of 'free' (yes, it is a script which emulates the Linux 
> command of the same name):
> 
>              total       used       free    buffers
> Mem:         13544      12532       1012          0
> Swap:        66020          0      66020
> 
> And here is the output of 'ps auxw':
> 
> USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ   RSS TT STAT STARTED    TIME COMMAND
> root   0  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DKs   4:08PM 0:00.02 [swapper]
> root 297  0.0  5.8 580  1172 E0 Ss    4:33PM 0:01.72 -bash 
> root 180  0.0  1.9 224   376 ?? Ss    4:10PM 0:00.13 /usr/sbin/cron 
> root 175  0.0  0.0  60     4 ?? SWs        - 0:00.00 /usr/sbin/inetd -l 
> root  87  0.0  0.0 168     4 ?? SWs        - 0:00.00 /usr/sbin/syslogd -s 
> root   8  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:00.28 [aiodoned]
> root   7  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:03.40 [ioflush]
> root   6  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:00.61 [reaper]
> root   5  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:00.17 [pagedaemon]
> root   4  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:00.00 [pcic0,0,1]
> root   3  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:00.00 [pcic0,0,0]
> root   2  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:00.00 [pms0]
> root   1  0.0  0.0 340     4 ?? SWs        - 0:00.00 init 
> root 322  0.0  1.2 372   244 E0 R+    4:35PM 0:00.03 ps auxw 
> 
> What in heck are these things, and why are they eating all of my RAM!? 
> About all that I can guess at are pcic0,0,[01] (i.e. my PCMCIA drivers, 
> no?) and pagedaemon (some sort of swapspace handler)? And reaper, I 
> suppose, kills old tasks?

These are all kernel threads. The size reported by ps (or top) is
the amount of RAM used by the kernel.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 24 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--