On 02/09/2011 06:13 PM, john wrote: > I'll also add that after all users log out memory usage remains high. > Once users have logged off and processes have ended, I would expect > memory to be freed.
Cache, which is what the bulk of your memory is used for, is not directly related to running processes so in general I would not expect to see much memory freed when everyone logs out. Don't worry about it though. Having memory used for cache is a good thing. It puts otherwise wasted free memory to use speeding up your system. >> Thanks for the good news. However, the the additional bit that I >> should have mentioned is that once the memory usage shows >> that I am nearly "out" of ram , TOP shows that the disk will start >> using SWAP. I thought that what should happen is that as memory >> demands grow the CPU >> should move stale data from buffers to disk and free more memory for >> applications and that swapping was a sign that it was digging into the >> disk for VM. >> Am I just not understanding how this all works? I suspect you are not understanding how this all works, but then kernel memory management is not a simple thing. Suffice it to say the kernel it is probably doing the right thing. If it is using a moderate amount of swap it is probably because the kernel decided the system would be better off removing some rarely used code from RAM instead of removing cache. If you want some control over how readily stuff is swapped out you can google swappiness. However, like I said above, cache is a good thing and in general you should not be trying to prevent your system from using it. Think of cache as a dynamic SSD but much faster. Who wouldn't want that? Jeff ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE: Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen. Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle. Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
