how to track down a mem leak?

[Colin Brace]

Hi all,

I am running FC5 with the latest kernel (2.6.16-1.2133). Just now my
system seems to have choked up from a memory leak. I ssh'ed in from a
laptop and 'top' indicated that all the virtual memory was in use, but
alas the system became unresponsive and I could not further
investigate what in particular was the memory hog. At that point, the
box didn't even respond to ctr-alt-backspace, so I had to hit the
power switch.

Is there any way of logging memory use? Any other suggestions as to
how to track down what went wrong?

-- 
  Colin Brace
  Amsterdam