On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 04:19:59PM -0500, Chris Carbaugh wrote: > Linux's memory manage will use every last bit of RAM it can. If you > have 1 gig or RAM and run a lot of apps at the same time, you can easily > use all of that RAM. Pull out half the RAM, or even 3\4's of it, run > the same apps. A lot of time you won't notice a difference. Right. That's because much of the time, the extra memory goes to disk buffers and cache. The kernel will uses all the extra memory for those. So you often see a low "free" value, but you can almost always count the buffer and cached as "free" since the kernel will just take memory away from these as needed. > Of course all this is subject to each setup. But my point is, Linux > will use all the RAM it can, but it's not fair to call it and it's apps > memory hogs. Well, what is or isn't a memory hog is debatable. From your list below, the web browser (Galeon) is using 43MB of memory (the RSS column is the important one). BTW, only count the first entry even though Galeon is listed 5 times. The other lines are threads of the same process and they all share the same 43MB. Is 43MB a memory hog? If you've only got 64MB of memory, I'd say yes. :) Now it is possible that Galeon would use less if you only had 64MB, but not by much. But with memory being so cheap, 256MB is common and 512MB is easily attainable, 43MB for one app isn't that bad. > Here's a sample of 'top' from my machine, RadHat 7.1 > > 384MB of Ram installed, just about all being used, only about 128MB > swapped to hard drive. This on a 400Mhz PII. And it's responsive as > can be. Also note the Vmware entry. I'm running AutoCAD on NT4 > Workstation under Linux. It's pretty responsive as well. And > everything has been running for 24 days. Right. And top is listing only 40MB as free, which is a little misleading. 30MB is used for disk buffers and 144MB is used for disk cache. This means you really have closer to 214MB free and brings you to about 55% memory utilization. -Dave > 4:15pm up 24 days, 22:47, 3 users, load average: 0.16, 0.10, 0.09 > 125 processes: 119 sleeping, 3 running, 3 zombie, 0 stopped > CPU states: 3.1% user, 6.0% system, 0.0% nice, 90.8% idle > Mem: 384468K av, 344296K used, 40172K free, 7068K shrd, 29340K > buff > Swap: 1052216K av, 130016K used, 922200K free 144864K > cached > > PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND > 30888 chriscar 14 0 90984 72M 73540 S 1.9 19.3 8:12 vmware > 5400 chriscar 9 0 49016 43M 35632 S 0.0 11.5 33:00 galeon-bin > 5409 chriscar 9 0 49016 43M 35632 S 0.0 11.5 0:00 galeon-bin > 5410 chriscar 9 0 49016 43M 35632 S 0.0 11.5 0:09 galeon-bin > 5411 chriscar 9 0 49016 43M 35632 S 0.0 11.5 0:02 galeon-bin > 30878 chriscar 9 0 49016 43M 35632 S 0.0 11.5 0:00 galeon-bin > 1145 root 18 0 83412 40M 26840 R 3.1 10.8 2740m X > 13214 chriscar 9 0 34276 31M 14412 S 0.0 8.2 2:26 > evolution-mail > 13237 chriscar 9 0 34276 31M 14412 S 0.0 8.2 0:00 > evolution-mail > 13238 chriscar 9 0 34276 31M 14412 S 0.0 8.2 0:07 > evolution-mail > 13239 chriscar 9 0 34276 31M 14412 S 0.0 8.2 0:00 > evolution-mail > 13242 chriscar 9 0 34276 31M 14412 S 0.0 8.2 3:31 > evolution-mail > 13285 chriscar 9 0 34276 31M 14412 S 0.0 8.2 3:35 > evolution-mail -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics (like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics