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Is it usefull to put more than 128 MB on a Linux machine?


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Guest coldascold

On my Netserver I have 64MB and never have a problem althrough it dosent ever run in graphical mode but takes alot of hacking from LAN,WWW,CVS, SCSI storage backup system;

 

        total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached

Mem:         62308      56544       5764          0       7336      11924

-/+ buffers/cache:      37284      25024

Swap:       409576      36340     373236

 

Also on standard pc's I have never found a reason for lots of ram with linux

However I can see the need for ram with MS DX Games as they suck you hard disk dry just to load the API up alll be it a larger video card helps only fractionaly

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You should also look at the chips you have now and how many slots you have.

 

E.g. Let's say you have 2 slots and both have a 64Meg chip. In this case, you shoudl probably replace them both with 256 or a 256 and a 128.

 

I would recommend 384 (256+128) at minimum to mostly avoid swapping.. But with prices so cheap, consider at a 256 + 256

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When you run free -m, you get physical ram free, buffers, and swap. Could someone explain what the buffers line is for? Is it things that are using ram but can be removed if needed?

 

Andrew

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  • 2 weeks later...

What I found out is that when I added a DVD player with 256 megs of ram the video was a little skittish. So, I doubled the ram to 512 and the DVD plays perfect. As for when I was running just the 256 I didn't noticed a drag on the system so I never thought too much about needing more. Altho I do have this thing for maxing out a mobo. I just looked at my -m and it shows a total mem of 504; used 241; free 262. Swap: total 243; used 0; free 243. As far as I know this seems good. At this point I am on the 'net with Mozilla 1.1 and nothing else happening (that I am aware of).

 

Later. Pepse.

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Andrew:

 

man free

 

would have revealed the following to you:

SYNOPSIS

      free [-b | -k | -m] [-o] [-s delay ] [-t] [-V]



DESCRIPTION

      free  displays the total amount of free and used physical and swap mem-

      ory in the system, as well as the shared memory and buffers used by the

      kernel.

 

So the shared mem and buffers are kernel related occupied memory.

 

Ah the power of 'man' ;) BTW try xman to get to know some commands... :)

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             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached

Mem:           503        468         34          0        117        158

-/+ buffers/cache:        192        310

Swap:         2028         98       1929

Total:        2531        566       1964

 

I have 512mb RAM, and 2G swap. Most of the time I don't need 2G of course, but I use a source based distro, and do some extremely heavy video editing. In my experience, the more memory the better.

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So the shared mem and buffers are kernel related occupied memory.

 

That makes more sense than the man page. :-) What I'm confused about is how buffers relate to determining how much memory is actually free. I remember reading in a HOW-TO doc to "ignore buffers, because they don't matter". So, are buffers like a system heap? Right now, free -m shows 111Mb of buffers used. I can't imagine the kernel taking that much RAM by itself. What am I missing?

 

Thanks,

Andrew

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i reckon the more the better ....

786Mb ram, with 500Mb swap

paul@trinity paul $ free

            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached

Mem:        774476     770040       4436          0      35316     618436

-/+ buffers/cache:     116288     658188

Swap:       498004        312     497692

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Well.. depending on whether you installed texstar's urpmi repository in your urpmi database or not. Texstar's gkrellm is version 2.x while the ones in the mandrake disks are version 1.x.

 

Gkrellm is so useful, it's almost like a wallpaper in my desktop :)

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Guest metz2000

[metz@localhost metz]$ free

            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached

Mem:        159712     155096       4616          0       3468      55568

-/+ buffers/cache:      96060      63652

Swap:       253976       9688     244288

 

I have 4 Mozilla windows, one konsole, The GIMP, Konqueror (file browsing), KDE Help Centre, and KMail.

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