After using the laptop for several days without rebooting, I start to get into awful swapping problems (combined with very poor responsiveness during IO operations, swapping 10mb could mean that the desktop is unresponsivel for 5s, but 200mb at once will mean that it is completely unresponsive for several minutes straight while it grinds the disk).
With all interface-apps shut down, the system monitor is reporting that over half of my 4GB is being used on something. What exactly, though? System Monitor, when showing 'All Processes', does not list enough to add up to 2GB.
Using the top command shows similar numbers - not a lot of processes using RAM, but the statistics show half used.
My concern is what is actually using the memory up that I don't see?