Maybe you're measuring the wrong thing...
Memory unused is memory wasted, so linux uses spare memory as a disk cache.
socks:/junk# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1011 877 133 0 0 476
-/+ buffers/cache: 400 610
Swap: 964 229 734
So theres 964 Mb of swap, of which 229 is used. Theres 1011 Mb of memory,
of which 877 is used and 133 is free. 476 Mb of that used memory is disk
cache that will be freed up if the system starts to need it. So if the disk
cache was freed there would be 400 Mb used and 610 Mb free.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jamie Dobbs [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, 11 April 2005 2:04 p.m.
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Odd memory usage
><snip>
>>
> ps -ef will give you a list of what's running. Test ni and out of this
> period, and subtract one from the other?
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Steve
> PS. options growright keeps you saner!
Yeah, I will implement growright now as it will make it a bit easier on the
brain. I have found the culprit as soon as I run a tar command to back up my
maildirs the free memory drops tp 14MB! I've upgraded to tar 1.14 and that
has made no difference, would I be better to change toa different method of
backup such as CPIO (although I have no idea how to use it!).
