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

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all,

On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 3:23 PM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
One update is that I discovered that the VLC process's "VIRT" column in
htop continuously increases while it is exhibiting this problem while the
rest of the memory-related columns (including the percentage) remain the
same.

        M_SIZE (VIRT)
            The size of the virtual memory of the process.


Thanks to someone on Freenode for the tip.

-- 
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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