I'm having trouble finding from where this memory leak is occurring. I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on a Dell XPS M1530. I have 3GB of ram and I'm finding after about an hour or so of use top shows me 2GBs+ used. The strange thing is when I add up the memory percentages by PID either from top or ps aux I find that I should only be using about 20-25% of my available ram.

What brought this to my attention was I've begun running vmware server again. Now, obviously the ram usage spikes when I load a virtual machine, but the memory VMware is using does not account for the memory usage I'm seeing via top or free. Stopping vmware server releases the memory which was allocated to it, but I'm still unable to find where this RAM is being used. After a complete reboot, of course, the memory is fine, but very quickly it climbs to 60-80% usage with the processes only appearing to account for a third of that. Any ideas where I should look for more information on what this could be?