[ale] Memory Usage

[Michael B Golden]

My system continually runs out of memory. It has 24M RAM in it and a 64M
(I set it as 64, but the number reported by free seems to be different.
Go figure.)  Swap Partition. It never has used more than 10M of the Swap
ever. Even when I'm not running anything but the daemons, it uses a lot.
Is this normal?

Output of ps ax :
  PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND
    1  ?  S    0:02 init
    2  ?  SW   0:00 (kflushd)
    3  ?  SW<  0:06 (kswapd)
    4  ?  SW   0:00 (md_thread)
    5  ?  SW   0:00 (md_thread)
   36  ?  S    0:00 /sbin/kerneld
  173  ?  S    0:00 syslogd
  182  ?  S    0:02 klogd
  204  ?  S    0:00 crond
  216  ?  S    0:00 (inetd)
  228  ?  S    0:00 (lpd)
  252  ?  S    0:00 /usr/sbin/automount --timeout 60 /misc file
/etc/auto.misc
  271  ?  S    0:00 sendmail: accepting connections on port 25
  316   5 S    0:00 (mingetty)
  318  ?  S    0:01 update (bdflush)
  319   6 S    0:00 (mingetty)
  725   4 S    0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty4
  727   3 S    0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty3
  729   2 S    0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty2
  731   1 S    0:01 -bash
  743   1 R    0:00 ps ax
  159  ?  S    0:00 (portmap)
  193  ?  S    0:00 /usr/sbin/atd

Output of free :
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         22724      16444       6280       3328       1624      12708
-/+ buffers/cache:       2112      20612
Swap:        72256        896      71360

This test was performed with only one user logged in running nothing
except that listed above. Do I really need all of that running? If not,
which can I remove? (I'm not even sure what it all is). It is important,
because I keep pushing it and having to flip the switch on it because I
manage to freeze it by stuffing too much into memory. I don't have the
money to stick more RAM into it, so that isn't an option, and it doesn't
care to use the swap very often. What can I do?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Golden
Naugrim at Juno.com (Normal, no attachments)
MGolden at Airapps.com (Only for messages with attachments.)
RedHat 5.2 (2.0.36) Linux user -- Linux Advocate

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