Kevin Geiss wrote:
On Sun, Aug 03, 2003 at 10:57:57PM +0300, Anarky wrote:
one thing wierd for me: if I just start my computer .. & just start
nothing but blackbox I may pretty well find 200 of 256 mb already
occupied :P
Don't know if anyone already answered this, but the reason all your memory
looks full is because Linux will keep a copy of everything it ever reads
from your harddrive in memory in case it needs to be read again. This is
called 'buffers and caches'. if memory is needed for a running program,
Linux will free up some of the buffers and caches and give that memory
to the program which needs it.
you can see this with the 'free -m' command:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 439 402 37 0 140 136
-/+ buffers/cache: 125 314
Swap: 682 2 679
(the -m asks 'free' to output all number in megabytes which makes it easier
to read).
The first line says that 402mb of memory are used (out of 448), but the
second line reports that if you don't count the buffers and caches, only
125mb are being used. And that's running a full KDE desktop! So look at
'free -m' again and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
There is a neat dockapp for the slit called allin1 which will show the
breakdown of different types of memory.
http://digilander.libero.it/tailchaser/en_linux_allin1.html
also, someone was saying your swap partition should be twice the size of
your ram. that recommendation was from back in the Linux 2.4.12 days when
there was a bug in the virtual memory system.
The real amount of swap you need depends on what you plan to do. the more
stuff you run, the more memory you need. the total amount of memory you will
have available is ram + swap space. But of course with big hard drives these
days, it's easy to make swap half a gig and never worry about it.
personally, the only time I've used more than 5mb or so of swap is on
a server, or if a program goes wild and gets out of control.
wow. thanks for the cool explanation. Learned some new (cool stuff) :P
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