I'm pretty sure I have some kind of memory leak. Here's what free reports: # free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1017876 955404 62472 0 128624 127944 -/+ buffers/cache: 698836 319040 Swap: 2040244 1652 2038592 Which suggests that I have 700MB "used". But running ps: # ps aux | head -n 1 | cut -c 1-100; ps aux | sort -n -r -k 4 | grep -v COMMAND | head -n 10 USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND danny 26598 1.0 13.7 292692 139520 pts/0 Sl Jan19 18:07 /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.9/firefox-bin root 30466 1.1 13.6 145744 138984 tty7 Ss+ Jan16 66:01 /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -br -audit 0 -auth /var/gdm/:0.Xauth -nolisten tcp vt7 danny 7417 0.0 6.4 112068 65372 pts/1 S Jan17 3:52 /usr/lib/opera/9.02-20060919.6/opera -style Bluecurve danny 6589 0.0 1.1 16052 12012 ? S Jan17 0:00 /usr/bin/xpdf /tmp/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf xfs 2262 0.0 0.6 8484 6700 ? Ss Jan06 0:01 xfs -droppriv -daemon root 1946 0.0 0.6 9456 6996 ? Ss Jan06 0:00 /usr/sbin/restorecond ntp 2143 0.0 0.4 4300 4300 ? SLs Jan06 0:00 ntpd -u ntp:ntp -p /var/run/ntpd.pid -g root 2412 0.0 0.3 15344 3084 ? S Jan06 0:00 /usr/sbin/gdm-binary -nodaemon danny 30551 0.0 0.3 9264 3220 ? S Jan16 0:02 xterm -geometry +5+530 -sb -n alvis1 -e ssh -C alvis danny 30547 0.0 0.3 8508 3568 ? S Jan16 0:02 xterm -geometry 80x38+12+0 -font 10x20 -n root That is, the top ten processes have about 350MB resident. I don't have a huge number of small processes or anything like that, so it seems to me that about 300MB is "missing in action". I'm running "2.6.18-1.2869.fc6 #1 SMP". Danny. --------------------------------------------------------- http://dannyreviews.com/ - over nine hundred book reviews http://danny.oz.au/ - civil liberties, travel tales, blog ---------------------------------------------------------