javaguy Posted February 18, 2006 Report Share Posted February 18, 2006 Please bear with me for a relative newbie question. The only apps I'm currently running are Konsole and Mozilla, and I haven't been doing anything unusual (I don't think) with either, so I'm trying to figure out why I get this when I check my free memory: > free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1036016 960160 75856 0 204288 327628 -/+ buffers/cache: 428244 607772 Swap: 1903660 0 1903660 I've run top and didn't see anything noteworthy. How do I figure out what's taking up 960160 bytes of my RAM? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chalex20 Posted February 18, 2006 Report Share Posted February 18, 2006 Please bear with me for a relative newbie question. The only apps I'm currently running are Konsole and Mozilla, The only GUI applications you've opened are Konsole and Mozilla. Other KDE components and console processes use their shares of memory as well. and I haven't been doing anything unusual (I don't think) with either, so I'm trying to figure out why I get this when I check my free memory: > free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1036016 960160 75856 0 204288 327628 -/+ buffers/cache: 428244 607772 Swap: 1903660 0 1903660 Pay attention to "buffers" and "cached" in the first line, and also to the second line. The matter is that Linux tries to use all of the memory it finds available, for system needs ( it would be pretty stupid to do otherwise; why pay for memory which would never be used?). "Buffers" and "cached" numbers reflect this very memory, used not by the applications but rather by Linux kernel itself. In case applications demand more memory, Linux will just use less memory for buffers. So, application-wise, "buffers" and "cached" memory should be considered "free", as it would be allocated to applications upon first demand. If you look at "-/+ buffers/cache" line, you would see exactly this picture : applications use 428244 K memory, and 607772 K memory are "free". I've run top and didn't see anything noteworthy. How do I figure out what's taking up 960160 bytes of my RAM? As discussed above, about 500M of your RAM are taken by the Linux kernel for its own needs ( buffers and disk cache ). Almost all of them are still available for applications. 400M are taken by the applications themselves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted February 18, 2006 Report Share Posted February 18, 2006 try these commands ps auxO-s to get a specific process (example xorg) ps aux | grep "[X]" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.