Brian,
Linux will take RAM to use as disk cache and then gives it back whenever
a program needs it, is this what you are seeing?
There is a way of telling how much it is actually using, but it escapes
me at the moment. The non-elegant way to do it is to type "ps -aux" and
total up the memory being used.
Thanks,
Allan
Brian Smith wrote:
>
> OK - I'm recognizing all my (256Mb) memory without the option & I'm not
> knowingly doing anything thready. However, it appears I was fibbing about
> the memory beeing hogged from the start - before I do anything I get
>
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 257536 28592 228944 13976 1988 13524
> -/+ buffers/cache: 13080 244456
> Swap: 272136 0 272136
>
> 28Mb for a fantastic operating system - no problem. Even with X + gnome
> on top I'm not too concerned (though I might go back to fvwm or something
> littler than gnome/sawfish)
>
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 257536 63896 193640 46632 3204 30312
> -/+ buffers/cache: 30380 227156
> Swap: 272136 0 272136
>
> So what it looks like to me is that there is a problem freeing up memory
> after a program has closed - for example open netscape and then close it
>
> before
> total used free shared buffers
> cached
> Mem: 257536 65816 191720 47980 3268 30648
> -/+ buffers/cache: 31900 225636
> Swap: 272136 0 272136
>
> during
> total used free shared buffers
> cached
> Mem: 257536 86244 171292 59508 3456 43056
> -/+ buffers/cache: 39732 217804
> Swap: 272136 0 272136
>
> after
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 257536 80148 177388 48200 3572 43116
> -/+ buffers/cache: 33460 224076
> Swap: 272136 0 272136
>
> So quite quickly you can stack up over 100Mb of "used" memory which never
> seems to come free again. This hasn't been a problem so far on this
> machine, but a colleague who only has 128Mb in her machine quickly
> gets into ugly swapping situations.
>
> Yours,
> Brian
>
> On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Paul Millar wrote:
>
--
Intel: We put the 'um...' in Pentium.
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