What is hammering my memory?

[NoOp]

On 07/02/2010 09:21 AM, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 2 July 2010 17:11, Chan Chung Hang Christopher
> <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:
>> The Linux kernel. It's normal. Most of your chewed up memory is taken up
>> by the page cache. Nothing to worry about. The kernel will automatically
>> free up memory as needed. The page cache attempts to save you from
>> having to operate at hard disk speed (milliseconds) as opposed to RAM
>> speed (microseconds) so if you want a culprit, it is the kernel. If you
>> are really not happy about it using memory, set swappiness to zero.
>>
> 
> I'll ask a different question, then. What could be causing the system
> to be so sluggish? I see nothing in top that looks to be a hog.
> 
> top - 16:57:03 up  1:50,  2 users,  load average: 0.72, 0.70, 0.54
> Tasks: 179 total,   1 running, 176 sleeping,   0 stopped,   2 zombie

Are those 2 zombie processes remaining, or do they eventually go away?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_process