<quote who="Russell Andrew Willis">
> From what I can see my swap usage at startup is only about 1.48% of
> available, Mem stats however are 97.57% used ? (when I obtained this data I
> had just booted into the gnome gui, a few panel applets running but no
> programs). Is this amount of memory usage the usual ?, if so then more memory
> is the way to go. I presume the number of programs running is not the issue.
You'll want to have a read of this short document that describes how GNOME
uses memory, and how (not) to measure it:
http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/white-papers/MemoryUsage/MemoryUsage.txt
It's also helpful to note that Linux uses available memory for its buffer
cache, so the reading from top is never really correct. If you run 'free',
it tells you a bit more about what's going on. Here's the output from my
machine right now:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 126096 122396 3700 0 0 72844
-/+ buffers/cache: 49552 76544
Swap: 313188 72740 240448
So, I have 128MB RAM, and it looks as if I'm using about 120MB of it.
However, quite a bit of that is just Linux using the available memory for
its own nefarious purposes [ ie. to confuse everyone and anyone new to using
*nix-like operating systems ;) ].
I would recommend, however, that you upgrade to 128MB RAM. Recent releases
of GNOME do not run so well with only 64.
- Jeff
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