[comp.sys.dec] VaxStation II losing memory?

jdubb@bucsf.bu.edu (jay dubb) (04/24/91)

   I am posting this for a friend of mine who doesn't have access
to USENET, so please respond directly to mlevin@jade.tufts.edu.

   About a month ago I started up my VaxStation with Ultrix 4.1, and
the workstation software. It has 8 Megs of additional RAM, and
DecWrite, DecChart, and DecEquation. Its worked beautifully for the
month, with tons of processes going at once (kermit, DecTerm,
DecWrite, DecChart, switching between the windows) - nothing crashed,
and it worked just fine. But then I started getting messages that said
"out of memory - saving everything" from DecWrite. And now, several
things that I used to do before with no problem crash the program
completely, due to running out of memory. 
     Does anyone know what is going on? Where oh where has my memory
gone? I have heard of "growing X servers", but maybe this has nothing
to do with it (I know next to nothing about windows stuff).  I note
that my X server, Xqvsm, is about 1 meg large, and there is also
a Xqvsm.new (where did this come from??) also about one Meg large. Is
this normal?  Someone has also pointed out that it maybe that
the swap space is getting fragmented. Well, I did "pstat
-s", and it told me (I have 8 Megs of RAM in my machine, and an
RD54 hard disk, which is about 95% full):
25078k swap configured
11264k reserved virtual address space
	8451k used (3264k used, 0k smem)
	16627k free, 426k wasted, 0k missing
eval: 518+ 32k 51+1k
I have no idea what all of this means, but 426k wasted doesn't seem
good. Is all of this normal? If not, can it account for messages such
as "out of memory - saving everything" from things like DecWrite when
I have lots of processes running? If so, how do I fix it? The machine
has been rebooted today, btw. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

				Mike Levin (mlevin@jade.tufts.edu)