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

[E.S. Rosenberg]

This is just a hunch but I think filesystem caching is not counted
towards a process' memory usage, so if you are playing a large movie a
large chunk (or the whole file) may be kept in memory by the
filesystem driver while being memory that is 'available' for immediate
freeing it is counted as %used but not as process used since it's the
driver/kernel.

2016-08-03 15:23 GMT+03:00 Shlomi Fish <shlomif at gmail.com>:
> 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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