When I boot my computer and startx into WindowMaker I get memory usage of only 68-70mb after lxterminal ; dhcpcd ; htop. After using it with audacious 2 and browsing a few pages in google-chromium and then closing everything (not windowmaker) ram using is still around 73mb.

Now if I do the samething with Gnome (Gnome-light). Startx ; gnome-terminal ; dhcpcd ; htop I get 90-92mb of ram usage. Ok this is great (yeah I like gnome now. Don't know what KDE was thinking with 4.X) but I open google-chromium, browse a few pages (only 3 tabs open all linuxquestions.org lol) with audacious in background I get upward of 260-300+ MB's of ram usage!

Ok I figure maybe there's a caching thing going on with gnome or something but. I close Gnome-X.org and go back to framebuffer console (real-mode terminal) and hit htop and I still get 300+mb ram usage! Everything listed in htop seems fine and doesn't show anything using that much ram! I'd post a pic of it but how do i do that from real-mode framebuffer terminal outside of X. Trust me there's only like 4-5 processes running (hald dbus dhcpcd) and nothing shows using that much ram.

I edit my ~/.xinitrc and startx into windowmaker and htop still shows 300+mb of ram usage! It doesn't show anything using all that ram? Not even when I'm back in Gnome? I've restarted my pc before starting Gnome and still the same problem. This never happens if I use WindowMaker (yeah I like windowmaker too!!11nez) after reboot upon hours of use.

So is this just a memory leak? This also occured before I added the ~x86 use flag and hence I was using stable packages. Now that I'm bleeding edge it still occurs but at least my system is bleeding edge haha lol.

So what's going on with Gnome? Anyone else had this issue and solved it?

This must come up every day.
Read this. Post back with specific questions.

1 members found this post helpful.

Well I don't know what to say cause I thought you'd be right but according to that article free -m should show my real free ram in the buffers/cache column. Doing a free -m resulted in about 600 mb free. So I don't know what to say as htop shows 200-250mb of ram being used but doesn't show what it is.

Oh and just to make it to not make any sense at all! After emerging, playing nexuiz and doing some other things for some hours and closing everything except gnome. Memory usage dropped to 100mb used. So yeah... Gnome is just retarded I guess. It doesn't seem like disk cache is causing it, especially since memory usage never goes up like that in windowmaker, and I can't prove if gnome is causing it. Either way I'm not running out of ram for anything and I don't care anymore. I'll just use windowmaker if it becomes a big deal.

I didn't know about free -m (been using linux since slackware 12.x) and always used htop. Thanks for your help mate!