What is hammering my memory?

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

You might find iotop useful to track down disk I/O issues. e.g.

iotop -o

I tracked down an issue using iotop with mlocate running an update every
morning.  If you power off your machine at night and power it up in the
morning, mlocatedb will index your file system, regardless of the time
in the morning.  That is a feature of anacron. I have also had trackerd
indexing cause I/O related sluggishness. 

Normally, this will show up in top as excessive I/O wait which your top
snapshot does not indicate is a problem.

-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
Computer Systems and
Network Consultant
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005