excessive RAM consumption - memory leak

[eliott]

> I do have a script that restarts Nginx already, however, only rebooting
>  the machine actually clears the RAM. This is why I was curious to know
>  how and what Nginx stores in the RAM.

Wait.. are you talking about overall system ram, or ram used by nginx processes?
If you mean overall system ram, you are probably just noticing that
the OS (esp linux) has cached many of the files in the filesystem
(IOcache) to speed up read operations.