How can the total memory consumption rise without top/htop displaying increasing processes' use?

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all!

I reported a bug in VLC earlier today about it causing increasing total RAM
consumption:

https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/17241

However, the strange thing is when it happens, the %MEM usage of the system
increases, but I don't see it in htop/top (as root)'s individual processes'
RAM consumption. And the memory gets freed after I quit VLC Player.

Why? How is it possible? Where does all the memory go?

I'm on mageia v6 x86-64 with :

shlomif at telaviv1:~$ uname -a
Linux telaviv1.shlomifish.org 4.7.0-desktop-2.mga6 #1 SMP Sat Jul 30
21:54:30 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Is this a bug somewhere? Any insights will be appreciated.

Regards,

     -- Shlomi Fish

-- 
Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/

You can never truly appreciate The Gilmore Girls until you've watched it in
the original Klingon.

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