First off the main problem I seem to be having is with memory. My
machine is a HP Celeron 566 with 384Mb of RAM in it. Running Debian
recently upgraded to sid (but the problem seemed to be occuring
beforehand when I was running woody too) I'm running Gnome and sawfish.
Using Galeon to browse and evolution for mail. Nothing out of the
ordinary there.
I kind of expect Evolution to be a bit resource hungry and it is but
Galeon is just as bad it seems. I've got all this memoory and I'm still
basically running out. The machine actually started swapping pretty
furiously a while ago but admittedly I had a few things happening. It
wasn't for long. It's been happening for a while so I've added an applet
to the panel to monitor system memory. It starts off nice and low once
everything starts up and then only seems to go up.It will drop as you
start closing apps and windows left and right but only very slightly and
seemingly never anywhere near as much as it went up in the first place.
Now I seem to recall someone saying something about how once the system
uses memory it holds onto most of it and then distributes it to the apps
that need it without actually freeing it up? Was that right or was that
in reference to windows??
OK here's meminfo while I did that I had evolution open typing the mail
gtop running and two eterms one sshing to another box. Thats it aside
from the usual applets running in the panel (gaim, Xmms, d4X, odometer,
netleds and mixerapplet)
dan@silentbob:~$ cat /proc/meminfo
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 393097216 342855680 50241536 0 19484672 151195648
Swap: 208977920 307200 208670720
MemTotal: 383884 kB
MemFree: 49064 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Buffers: 19028 kB
Cached: 147352 kB
SwapCached: 300 kB
Active: 143856 kB
Inactive: 87616 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 383884 kB
LowFree: 49064 kB
SwapTotal: 204080 kB
SwapFree: 203780 kB
dan@silentbob:~$
So am I reading this right in saying even though I've only got say 50M
free out of my 380 odd since 145Mb or so is cached that's "free" in a
way too??
To be honest when the exact same box was running XP previously t this is
was doing so a great deal better. I know Linux shouldn't be running like
this and I'd appreciate anyone who could hit me with a cluestick as to
why.
If you think it will be too long and convoluted for the list please
email me off-list and once I get myself sorted out I'll post my
findings.
The other question I had was more out of curiosity.. What's the story
with load avgs. What's good and/or bad and will something like RC5
cracking skew them or are they based on other things??
Thanks,
Dan.
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/
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