That is an interesting analysis of the situation. I guess I'm used to
the world of Windows, where you want to have as much free RAM as
possible for programs to load into. I never use much swap, but it does
seem like X's and XMMS's RAM alotment grows as time goes on, which seems
to slow my system down after a while. I guess it's possible that I just
have lame hard drives that get slower the more they're used.
JJ
Leon Brooks wrote:
>
> Actually, your top shows 7MB of RAM free, not 70MB. This is as it should be; the
> ideal figure is nearly *zero* RAM free, because that means your system is
> *using* all of your RAM as efficiently as possible, unlike Windows which leaves
> it idle until you load Office or something else huge. Your system will not be
> slow for having ``no RAM left:'' for example, it is in the screenshot buffering
> 72MB worth of disk accesses.
>
> If the swap space in use (your screenshot shows only 4MB, a trivial amount) gets
> much above your RAM size, and note that you should have allocated at least twice
> as much swap space as you have, your system *may* begin to slow down. On the
> other hand, the stuff in swap is likely to be a bunch of things that you're not
> currently using anyway, so you should be pleased that your system has evicted it
> to disk (swap space) in order for the RAM it used to be better employed
> elsewhere. You will also be pleased to note that 104MB of it is being multi-used
> by several programs.
>
> I have no idea where gkrellm is getting 170MB from; it could be the sum of
> shared and buffered, or free swap plus buffered less something else, but I can't
> see any simple and sane source for that datum.
