[ale] Memory Usage

[Chris Ricker]

On Sat, 19 Jun 1999, Michael B Golden wrote:

> 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)

Others have already pointed out what you can kill and why you have more
memory available than you think you do.  In addition to that, though, you
appear to be running the default Slackware kernel, which isn't particularly
memory-optimal.  For example, you've got some kernel threads running from
the md (RAID) driver, which I really doubt you need.  That's not going to be
using much memory, but it's always going to be used....  Recompiling a
kernel without all the stuff like md that you don't need may help a little.  
Ultimately, though, you're just going to have to swap.  On the box I'm at
right now, netscape 4.61 has an rss on startup (before all the memory leaks
blow it up to 60 megs ;-) of 16 megs; add the 9 megs rss for the X server
and the 3.6 megs rss for WindowMaker, and you're well over 24 megs even
before you consider OS overhead.

later,
chris

-- 
Chris Ricker                                               kaboom at gatech.edu
                                              chris.ricker at genetics.utah.edu