I have a "dedicated system" (what do you call a system that's obviously not embedded but is designed (destined?) for a very narrow scope of operation?), a Compaq DL360 G1 box whose sole purpose in this existence is to run an application we have.

The system's got 512 MB main memory. When we first power up, according to top, pretty much all of that is free. When we start the application, it takes up some, but still there's a lot of memory free.

Then the application starts doing disk writes. It's streaming imaging data to disk at sustained rates as high as 30MBPS. I'm running top to get an idea of what's going on, and I watch the free memory sink to about 3MB of data free. It seems like the application hogs all the memory resources available. This is fine with me, I don't really want anything else running that isn't somehow supporting this application, but it looks kind of funky and I wonder what's going on.

Any ideas as to what may be going on? Is top lying, am I misinterpreting the value that top is showing, is all the memory getting mapped to the process even though it may not be completely used?

-Charles


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Charles Lockhart
Embedded Software Engineer
NASA InfraRed Telescope Facility
http://irtf.ifa.hawaii.edu/~lockhart
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(808)956-7635

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