On Wednesday 16 January 2002 09:55 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2002, Marc wrote:
> > 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.
> 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.
Good explaination. I'd add that various 2.4.x kernels seem to use
different amounts of /swap. Changes are being made to MM in the kernel.
With 512mb ram and 180mb swap and 2.4.8 kernels, ML 8.1, I never got
into /swap at all. IIRC, 2.4.12 thru 2.4.16 kernels would get about
25mb to 50mb into /swap and not release it. Using a 2.4.17 kernel now
with ML 8.2 (cooker), and it gets 10 to 15mb into /swap, but then over
time releases it down to just a few mb. 'Course 'swap -a off' and
'swap -a on' gets it back down to -0- ;)
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas, USA
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Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
