[Milhouse]

I'm running RBEJs latest Gotham build and 'top' is showing free memory of around approx 24MB after about 20hours of running. I've watched the memory usage as i've kicked of various things within XBMC, such as a backup (using the backup plugin) and playing various files and the free mem goes up and down between about 20MB and 35MB with no sign of issues, so I think this is just the Linux memory management using ram as a cache and free it up when needed.

In Frodo there was always much more memory free, closer to 300MB. To go from 300MB free in Frodo, to ~36MB (or less in your case) in Gotham might suggest something isn't quite as it should be. Then again it may be down to caching, but it's still a rather large difference.

I've just booted a Frodo build from 20 August, and with the XBMC GUI visible I have 325MB "free", which is 100MB more than a recent Gotham build. That alone is interesting, but could be accounted for by the increased level of caching in Gotham. However for free memory to drop as low as ~24MB (also add in the "buff" amount for the total free), which it never did in Frodo, is probably a cause for concern unless someone is able to categorically say it's not a problem. Since all the memory has been gobbled up by xbmc.bin though, it seems likely that it will be a problem, particularly when running other processes.

Frodo (fresh boot, 325MB "free"):

Code:

Mem: 192092K used, 189912K free, 0K shrd, 29108K buff, 106332K cached
CPU: 22.2% usr  0.0% sys  0.0% nic 77.7% idle  0.0% io  0.0% irq  0.0% sirq
Load average: 0.54 0.62 0.34 2/93 1636
  PID  PPID USER     STAT   VSZ %VSZ CPU %CPU COMMAND
1115  1052 root     R     318m 85.2   0 22.2 /usr/lib/xbmc/xbmc.bin --standalone -fs --lircdev /var/run/lirc/lircd

rpi512:~ # free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        382004     192124     189880          0      29108     106332
-/+ buffers/cache:      56684     325320
Swap:            0          0          0

Gotham (46MB "free"):

Code:

Mem: 347432K used, 34572K free, 0K shrd, 12076K buff, 71960K cached
CPU: 10.0% usr 20.0% sys  0.0% nic 70.0% idle  0.0% io  0.0% irq  0.0% sirq
Load average: 0.39 0.64 0.71 1/87 12846
  PID  PPID USER     STAT   VSZ %VSZ CPU %CPU COMMAND
1113  1051 root     S     512m137.3   0 22.5 /usr/lib/xbmc/xbmc.bin --standalone -fs --lircdev /var/run/lirc/lircd

rpi512:~ # free
             total         used         free       shared      buffers
Mem:        382004       347432        34572            0        12076
-/+ buffers:             335356        46648
Swap:            0            0            0