Hi,
Coming from just reading the thread about Netscape and it's dumb library
using so much ram I have a question:
I know that Linux uses all the ram it can take, using the unused amount
for cache and buffers.
So I start X, WindowMaker, some xterms, Netscape, gFTP, and after that
StarOffice. Then there is about 170M of my 192M used. Now I close
StarOffice. I know that some of it stays in the cache so it starts
faster the second time. I restart it and to my surprise my box starts
using the swap partition!
Here are relevant parts of 'top' with the M command:
7:13pm up 1 day, 1:26, 7 users, load average: 0.08, 0.05, 0.04
51 processes: 49 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 0.5% user, 2.7% system, 0.0% nice, 96.6% idle
Mem: 193024K av, 183864K used, 9160K free, 54972K shrd, 27524K buff
Swap: 120452K av, 384K used, 120068K free 108108K cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
6478 root 17 0 24728 24M 2172 R 0 0.3 12.8 1:18 X
7232 wobo 0 0 17476 17M 9264 S 7296 0.0 9.0 0:44
ld-linux.so.2
6880 root 0 0 4648 4264 3616 S 0 0.0 2.2 0:00 kdm
417 xfs 0 0 3828 3828 824 S 0 0.0 1.9 0:03 xfs
7247 wobo 0 0 3744 3744 3168 S 0 0.0 1.9 0:00
netscape-comm
7385 wobo 0 0 3724 3724 2756 S 0 0.0 1.9 0:34 gftp
As you can see there is a cache of 108108K. So if the cache doesn't get
reduced in favour of userspace, isn't there the danger of getting a
"Sorry, mate, no more free RAM! Close some apps to go on" message if I
continue to open and close apps?
I thought with 192M of RAM I'd never see swap used due to unsufficient
amount of physical ram.
Or is there a command to flush the cache (without danger of data-loss)?
wobo
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