ezroller Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 its not that you *need* the 2 gig, linux will just use whatever is available. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 coverup, most of that "used" ram is cached. It's completely normal. Cached ram is available for use. Linux will cache frequently used programs as you use them in ram so you don't have to access your hard drive as much next time you load a program. That's why mozilla takes longer to fire up the first time you load it after boot; it has to load from the hard drive. The second time is faster because the necessary files were cached in ram. For cached ram, if something else needs the ram it will clear the cached ram for use. If your using kde this is pretty easy to graphically see in kde control center>information>memory. A large percentage of your ram is probably under the "Disk Cache" category and little if any swap is ever used if you have 500MB of ram. It will just keep clearing out the cached ram as needed and not go into swap. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 (edited) unless I'm confused, it was coverups swap that was 780MB. That's not normal or cached. Edited January 23, 2004 by bvc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 (edited) bvc, you are right and I am wrong It's just that you should rarely go into swap with that much ram so I questioned whether his monitoring tool was accurate. Also, going into to swap to that extent should result in a huge performance hit; everything should slow down. If that's not occuring I wonder what's really going on with firebird. coverup, if you want to know what's using your memory run: $ ps aux and look at the %memory column. You'll be able to quickly identify what's sucking up your memory. Also, run: $ free -m to make sure that all your ram is being detected. Edited January 23, 2004 by pmpatrick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted January 24, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 24, 2004 bvc, thanks for bringing this up, I will certainly monitor the swap usage from now.... I still wonder, is there a clean way to free swap without rebooting? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted January 24, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 24, 2004 Ok, pmpatrick, from ps aux output, the hungriest apps are: 1) evolution; for some reason I have 6 evolution -mail processes running, each taking 3.1% of the memory; 2) mozilla firebid; 9 processes running, 7 of them take 6.6% of memory; Now, I have 512Mb of RAM, here is output of free $ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 513056 508516 4540 0 166892 89080 -/+ buffers/cache: 252544 260512 Swap: 923696 5424 918272 So, all memory is available. 5Mb of swap are used, though I am away from my desk for nearly 12 hours.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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