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

[Rabin Yasharzadehe]

Maybe it's writing/logging something to a tmpfs folder (like /tmp)

--
Rabin

On 3 August 2016 at 16:43, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>
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