Thanks Karl.
That's good info.
Paul W
On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, Karl J. Runge wrote:
>
> Hi Paul,
>
> I believe the standard philosophy is that if machine isn't utilizing
> (in some way) nearly 100% of the RAM then it is wasting the RAM.
> I agree with this for the most part.
>
> So it caches files, buffers i/o, and keeps other "slow" data in the
> RAM for quick access should the need for them arise again. The kernel
> has some algorithm (which you could likely tweak the parameters of
> which if so inclined, perhaps in /proc/sys/vm) to maintain these caches
> to (usually) provide good performance.
>
> Run the free(1) command to see the buffers and caches, etc.
> It is the same data as in /proc/meminfo.
>
> FWIW, here is a slow way to "reclaim" 30MB of RAM:
>
> perl -e '$x = "A" x 30e6; print length($x)'
>
> when this exits, this will clear out about 30MB of the caches and
> possible swap some inactive application pages to disk. I don't
> recommend doing this, since the kernel will fill them back up again in
> a short amount of time.
>
>
> Karl Runge
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, PK Whelan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Just a dumb question. Are there any utilities to clean (I should say
> > "reclaim") unused memory upon execution of the utility? I have one for NT
> > that actually works sometimes (other times rendering it useless). I have
> > 128M in my box at home and always seems to be running still a little
> > sluggish when it's been up for a while - with nothing more than an xterm
> > open (but I am running kde). Top and free generally report no more than 2
> > or 3 megs of free memory. <MoreBackground> AMD K6-2 300, 128M RAM, 2M
> > AGP, 126M Swap </MoreBackground>. If there is some kind of memory shredder
> > that can reclaim unused memory (or at least crash my system :-0 ) that
> > would be worth trying. Or is there even something native to linux that
> > does that (?).
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Paul Whelan
> >
> >
> >
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