> [I have 64 RAM (EDO) and 64 swap] > > When I have the 'xosview' program up, it says that 97% of my memory is > used and 0% swap. Of the memory about 40% is 'used' 55% is 'shared' and > 1% is 'buffered' > What does this mean?
I remember xosview giving rather bogus statistics at some time. Personaly, I would trust the restuls from "free" more. > Am I short on ram? When I open netscape, and all > six StarOffice programs (writer,calc,draw,math,image,chart) mem reads > about 1% used, 97% shared and 0% buffered. swap reads 8% used.. whats > the deal here? what does 'shared' memory mean? It's memory shared by more than one programme. For example, /lib/libc6 is only loaded once in memory, but about every programme you run uses it. So the memory taken up by /lib/libc6 is listed as "shared". If I recal correctly, "shared" really is the amount of memory you saved by the above trick, so you want "shared" to be as high as possible. Also "shared" can be much bigger than the total amount of memory (just load /lib/libc6 a thousand times in memory, you'll have saved 614 M, even on a 6 M machine). So, what xosview does in calculating persentages of "shared" mem is just bogus. Just another reason I didn't want to maintain xosview. As long as swap usage is low, and you don't notice too much swapping, I don't think you've got too little memory. But the output of "free" certainly tells more than "xosview". -- joost witteveen, [EMAIL PROTECTED] #!/usr/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/) #what's this? see http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .