On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Alister Waller wrote:
> I have a customer who says that his systems seems to be very memory hungry.
> Looking at the output below I can see that there is on 70MB of memory left
> out of 517MB.
It's all going in cache and buffers. Which isn't really used - it just
makes the system faster. Running programs will draw memory out of the
cache pool if needed, and put it back when it's not.
> [root@booth3 /root]# free
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 517124 442692 74432 110428 135888 220292
> -/+ buffers/cache: 86512 430612
> Swap: 1999968 9972 1989996
This is from my {currently} 1 user system, with three consoles running -
one of them running dnetc, which chews a fre resources. It's got 220 meg -
and only 16 meg is reported as "free" - but look at the buffers figure -
almost 167 meg.
Note that it's also using swap. A Unix system will almost always use
_some_ swap, unless it's just been started up.
fred:~ #
9:41am up 1 day, 21:59, 4 users, load average: 2.00, 2.00, 2.00
53 processes: 50 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 0.0% user, 97.6% system, 2.1% nice, 0.0% idle
Mem: 228892K av, 212376K used, 16516K free, 0K shrd, 166708K
buff
Swap: 433704K av, 380K used, 433324K free 9092K
cached
> PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
> 434 root 12 0 384 12 4 R 0 98.6 0.0 4295m klogd
This is what is eating your CPU time - but again, I suspect that this
would wind down if other processes needed it.
Unless the machine is using a sizable percentage of swap _constantly_,
then don't wory about the memory. And a sizeable percentage is like 30% or
more.
As for the CPU - kill klogd, and use something which is lighter on the
CPU.
DaZZa
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