Memory leaks in managed languages

So about half of what Tomboy uses in that scenario. You may already know all this, but RSS tells us how much actual physical ram is being used by the process. Virtual (and someone please correct me if I am inaccurate) is just how much memory the process has requested. Since Linux does lazy allocation of memory, and most apps don't actually touch nearly as much memory as they request, the virtual number is pretty meaningless. If you sort by size, descending, and then start adding up the virtual column, you'll likely quickly reach a point where total virtual far exceeds the sum of your ram and swap. It's pretty much a fiction.

To get the "real" unique memory usage for the process, you can (with the swap turned off) subtract the shared column from the rss column. The smem utility, featured a few days ago here on LWN, can show other interesting things, like proportional set size.

Sometimes I think that the authors of "top" had a special conference to determine how to present memory information in the most misleading way possible, and then wrote "top" based upon the results. Many people do think that the virtual size actually means something. And most new users seem to think that Linux is a sort of monster black hole of memory leakage, since no matter what they are doing, it sucks up all available memory until there is almost no free memory left. Htop is, at least, better.