Is there any way to reclaim my memory besides rebooting?

Fahrvergnuugen

I am the law!
I have a Dual 500MHz G4 with 1.2GB of RAM. I'm using System Manager to graph my memory usage.

I know this sounds like a stupid question, but after leaving my G4 on for a few days my "Active Memory" gets up over 1GB after I quit all of my applications. Soon after that, I start getting a ton of disk swaps and my system slows way down.

Rebooting causes everything to go back to normal for a few hours, but then slowly memory gets used up again and is never emptied or set to "inactive"

I think it might be my ftp server thats doing it, but I don't know how to tell for sure. I'm running Pureftpd and quite a few people log in / out of the server every day, but I never have more than 5 or 6 people connected at once.

The process viewer shows the window manager as using the highest percentage of ram, usually around 10%, which doesn't help explain where all my RAM has gone :(
 
I have noticed that alot of the peer to peer file sharing appls have tremenous memory leaks that eat up most of the available memory after running for some time. The latest version of aquisition (V0.66) used up over 700mb of ram in the first 5 minutes of operation and then aborted. The previous version (0.65) ran o.k. when re-installed.
 
ive noticed memory problems with aquisition as well, but when I quit the application, the memory becomes free or inactive again. this doesn't seem to be the case with my ftp server [which runs in place of the built in ftpd in my case]
 
Are you running pure-ftpd in xinetd or standalone mode? It has a very small memory footprint on my machine running under xinetd. It may consume more memory running in standalone mode, perhaps. Also, did you compile it with the --with-ftpwho switch or forego that for a more basic compilation?
 
G. Peretz: i compiled it with everything [i forget the exact flag] and it is running under xinetd.

Also, does the pureftpd child process crash if you do an ls -lr and there are more than ~4500 results? by default it only displays 2000, but as you can see in my xinetd.d/ftp file, I am running it with the -L option to increase the results to 4500. If I go any higher than that, the process crashes and I cannot figure out why.

I should try shutting down ftp for a few days to see if I have the same memory problem...thing is, there is never a good time to turn it off :(

service ftp
{
disable = no
socket_type = stream
wait = no
user = root
#server = /usr/libexec/ftpd
server = /usr/local/sbin/pure-ftpd
#server_args = -l
server_args = -j -lpuredb:/etc/pureftpd.pdb -L 4500:5 &
groups = yes
flags = REUSE
}
 
Which one of these headings from top translates into "memory used"?

#PRTS
#MREGS
RPRVT
RSHRD
RSIZE
VSIZE

There are some processes with HUGE VSIZE values.
 
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