memory leak? RHEL 5.5. RSS show ok, almost no free memory left, swap used heavily
Solution 1:
Check the VmPeak out of /proc:
$ grep ^VmPea /proc/*/status | sort -n -k+2 | tail
/proc/32253/status:VmPeak: 86104 kB
/proc/5425/status:VmPeak: 86104 kB
/proc/9830/status:VmPeak: 86200 kB
/proc/8729/status:VmPeak: 86248 kB
/proc/399/status:VmPeak: 86472 kB
/proc/19084/status:VmPeak: 87148 kB
/proc/13092/status:VmPeak: 88272 kB
/proc/3065/status:VmPeak: 387968 kB
/proc/26432/status:VmPeak: 483480 kB
/proc/31679/status:VmPeak: 611780 kB
This should show which pid has tried to consume the most VM resources and should point at the source of the usage. If you don't see the massive amount of memory in this list then you need to look at the rest of the numbers in /proc/meminfo.