[ale] Funny Mem Usage

[Joseph A. Knapka]

Timothy Ball wrote:
> 
> 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)

But he's got a bunch of memory missing *even after the cache is
taken into account*. That's what's causing the confusion.

Jeff, I'm curious to know what "top" shows immediately after
boot, without seti at home running.

-- Joe


-- Joe Knapka
"You know how many remote castles there are along the gorges? You
 can't MOVE for remote castles!" -- Lu Tze re. Uberwald
// Linux MM Documentation in progress:
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