How to spot a memory leak?

[yoxi]

I'm shooting in the dark with this one, so bear with me.

Somewhere in the last couple of alpha updates, my mac (tibook G4 400MHz, 1Gb ram) has begun paging out for the first time since I've had it - long 'write' pause followed by a 1Gb drop in free disc size. I haven't installed or used any new apps lately, so I'm wondering whether there's a memory leak in Neo (or in some other app, of course). How would I go about establishing this? I'm guessing that the memory usage in Activity Monitor or Top is the place to look - but at the moment the paging thing hasn't happened for a couple of days (and it didn't occur to me to look the previous times it happened, I was too busy). Am I going the right way about this?

*edit*
I know there's been stuff written about this in previous threads, but I can't seem to find it at the moment (plus it's bloody hot here in England at the moment and my brain's not working...) so I can't remember what the significance of real/virtual memory figures is, but currently for comparison, Safari vs. Neo (with no docs open):

Safari 170Mb/330Mb RM/VM
Neo 175Mb/1.03Gb RM/VM

A gigabyte seems extreme for Neo, but if I remember rightly, that's just 'reserved' memory, not what's actually being used?

- padmavyuha

[pluby]

The top command is what I use. I tend to look at resident memory as much of the virtual is double counted across applications for shared libraries, etc.

When you see the paging, run top and see who is using the most resident memory. Surprisingly, I found that Dashboard was usually the culprit.

Patrick

[LemonAid]

I tend to leave Activity Monitor running all the time - in Dock:

Name User CPU% Threads RM VM
dnetc philip 32.20 2 680.00 KB 36.68 MB
FahCore_78.exe philip 32.10 3 1.86 MB 41.57 MB
seamonkey-bin philip 15.30 12 158.86 MB 912.99 MB
WindowServer windowserver 4.70 2 61.61 MB 273.38 MB
kernel_task root 4.60 47 102.43 MB 880.13 MB
Activity Monitor philip 3.30 2 7.26 MB 174.20 MB
EarthDesk philip 1.20 3 65.53 MB 259.28 MB
pmTool root 1.10 1 552.00 KB 36.47 MB
NeoOffice philip 0.90 14 106.19 MB 1,004.29 MB

So it looks like I have NeoOffice 106MB-RM 1,004MB-VM
I have been leaving Neo running all the time (for testing) with a 2 page spreadsheet.

It does seems like the VM size has gotten larger. That seems a little larger than before (700-900 MB).
I don't worry much about VM it there is not a lot of Page Swapping

My Activity Monitor shows Other tasks taking up more CPU % - like Folding at Home (dnetc & FahCore_78.exe), SeaMonkey, and others.

Dashboard doesn't cause many problems for me - They show up only when I use Dashboard (4-stickies, 2-weathers, 2-clocks, Dictionary, Translator, iStumbler, Calculator ) and then fall off Activity Monitor

Philip ( VM? we don't need no stinking VM! )

[yoxi]

Thanks - I'll keep an eye on Top. Meanwhile, on a clean launch of Neo the RM is around 103Mb; each time I open a doc, the RM goes up around 10Mb or so - and stays there after I close the doc. So after a period of opening and editing various docs, the RM is up to 170Mb now, but that's with Writer, Calc, and Draw docs, so I guess more of the app modules are being cached. I would expect a rise each time I open a doc with fonts it hasn't seen before, but pretty much all of my docs use the same 2 fonts.

I'll wait and see if I get the pageout again.

- padmavyuha