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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