Hello Folks,
Problem: my customized usb live install of Slitaz 3.0, built from ISO with addition programs installed, is not releasing cached memory. Main symptom is Firefox crashes with OOM condition even though there some 600M of available cached memory at the time.
The Live USB boot setup was built with TAZUSB, with my rootfs.gz amounting to about 220MB. "/home" is mounted directed to the USB stick.
Oddly, when I try issuing either sync or "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" (or both commands) there is no change to the cached memory reported by "top." I can't put my finger on where meminfo is, but my memory stats are (at this moment):
Top:
Mem: 846060K used, 179268K free, 0K shrd, 1712K buff, 649172K cached
Free (note that busybox version doesn't support -m flag):
root@slitaz:/proc/sys/vm# free
total used free shared buffers
Mem: 1025328 890164 135164 0 1712
Swap: 0 0 0
Total: 1025328 890164 135164
As of this writing, I'm running Firefox, but if I continue working as I normally do, soon enough I'll have additional windows open and trigger an OOM KILL of Firefox, even though plenty of memory cache is available.
I'm thinking if most of my filesystem is running from RAM disk, the memory cache isn't doing me any good for those files. My /home is mounted directly to /dev/sdb1 (my booted USB stick) so the caching would help there, I suppose. I guess Firefox'es cached files are under /home and therefore are cached?
Any suggestions? System has 1MB of RAM but no hard drive installed (mostly because there may be a hardware issue with the built-in IDE controller on this old box -- I kept getting "BUS ERRORS" when trying to run from hard drive so switched to USB, which, apart from this problem, serves me well -- the machine will run stable for days with Slitaz as long as I don't overdo things with Firefox windows).
Thanks!
