[ale] Funny Mem Usage

[Timothy Ball]

On Sun, Jun 24, 2001 at 08:15:26PM -0400, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> Timothy Ball wrote:
> > 
> > On Sun, Jun 24, 2001 at 01:32:15AM -0400, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> > > Note that I have KDE and SETI at Home running, and nothing else of
> > > note.  However, look at that "211924K used" business.  Is top
> > > misreporting this somehow?  Nothing seems to justify nearly half
> > > of this RAM being taken up, including cache.
> > 
> > Linux is being smart about your memory state. It's best and far
> > faster for things to stay in cache than to reload from disk all the
> > time...
> 
> But even when the 88MB of cache is accounted for, ~122MB is being
> taken up by...what??  Are you saying that 2.4 just stakes out huge
> swaths of RAM that aren't being consumed by processes?  I supposed
> there's no harm done if so, but my sensibilities are going to need
> recalibrating.  

Recalibrate. :) Which would be best, to have a pile of ram always free
and swap all the time, or to cache and *use* the memory because you have
it?. It's much like the idea of the system "idle" process that sits down
and uses your cpu to 100% so that your cpu is used 100% of the time...
I bet you could start up three X servers and ninety copies of the gimp
and still be kosher. There would be a lot of memory used and a pile of
swap used but linux being "smart" as it were you'll notice little slow
down. 

Though apperently if one is running 2.4.x one should have SWAP=2xRAM
according to the lkml. I've been running 2.4.6-pre5-xfs-ext3 w/ little
to no problems as far as memory is concerned. (Though there is now 3/4's
of a Gig in ram on the box, and 1.3G of swap) 

--timball

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