On Wed, 16 Jan 2002, Marc wrote: > Chaps, > > > Is Mandrake 8.1 eating memory? > > First I only had 128MB of ram in my AMD K6-500 Mhz system. > When I booted linux and Xhad started all of the 128 Ram was used. So It had > to swap a lot when I worked on Linux. > > Today I upgraded my ram to a total of 384MB ram and a swap of 360 MB. At > first it looked like Mandrake was happy with this. But after an hour or two > more and more memory was used as it eventually began swapping to disk using > 95MB of swap. > > My goodness, Waht the heck is mandrake doing with all that memory, Even > wind&^s does not need that much memory.
There's a FAQ on this. Linux uses all available memory for buffers. If any application needs the memory, the buffer space is free immediately. This way none of your memory sits idle when it could be used to speed up your disk access or otherwise enhance performance. This is also one reason that Linux is more sensitive to marginal hardware. Using swap is not a bad thing. It means that the system is intelligent enough to move to disk any processes that don't need to be in memory. Thrashing is of course another thing entirely. > > I did not even do a lot with Mandrake. Only playing some mp3 and movies, and > trying out vmware 3.0. Here is a report of the free command. > > total used free shared buffers cached > Mem: 384488 380700 3788 2000 43288 242512 > -/+ buffers/cache: 94900 289588 > Swap: 361420 66824 294596 > > This is an extract from top -i: > > 30322 root 14 0 162M 161M 161M R 54.0 43.0 20:36 vmware > 6303 root 18 0 1124 1124 844 R 2.7 0.2 0:01 top > 6353 root 19 0 784 784 428 R 2.0 0.2 0:00 modprobe > 6825 marc 9 0 5872 4888 3972 D 0.0 1.2 0:30 xmms > > > Eventhough VMware uses 161MB of ram it is still bizar that linux consumes > that much RAM? is there a known memory leak somewhere? > > > Greetings > Marc > >
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