There's a good overview of this in the first four pages of http://www.atoptool.nl/download/case_leakage.pdf http://www.atoptool.nl/download/case_leakage.pdf Th

There's a good overview of this in the first four pages of http://www.atoptool.nl/download/case_leakage.pdf http://www.atoptool.nl/download/case_leakage.pdf The rest of that document shows how to use atop to monitor per-process memory usage and identify a memory leak.