Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Memory Usage

[Pooh Sun Tzu]

Maybe it is just me, but I've never in my entire experience had swap 
touched. And that is at 400 megs of RAM, in gnome, XFCE4, and fluxbox. 
Cached, sure. But he is running into swap, and that isn't supposed to 
happen.

Eamon Caddigan wrote:

David Hollister <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 

On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 21:29, Eamon Caddigan wrote:
   

Sorry if this is a trivial question...

But I recently upgraded my RAM (from 245 MB to 768 MB), and because of
this, I've been paying close attention to my memory usage. I was pretty
surprised to see that I'm still hitting swap after running a couple
simple apps in X. 

ps shows that none of the currently running processes are using a
significant percentage of my RAM. Logging out and back in doesn't help.
I can only guess that the kernel is using all this memory -- can anyone
recommend a tool to watch kernel memory usage, or any possible fixes for
this? I can't believe I'm using more physical memory now than I
previously had in physical and swap together!
     

It's probably not the kernel per-se, but the filesystem's buffer cache. 
Run "free" and look in the "cached" column.  The fs buffer cache will
use as much memory as you have.  You will still hit swap occasionally,
but generally, buffers should be purged from the cache to allow other
processes access to physical memory when needed.
   

Ah ha, there's almost 500 MB cached! I figured it was something like
this going on -- my system wasn't slowing down, but I was surprised to
see all the memory tied up. Now that I know this is normal, my mind is
set at ease.
Thanks for the replies!

-Eamon

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