Hi, Here is the output of 'top' on my system :
23:52:59 up 23 days, 13:21, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 22 processes: 21 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: 0.6% user, 0.4% system, 0.0% nice, 99.1% idle Mem: 255804K total, 229276K used, 26528K free, 10584K buffers Swap: 586144K total, 8384K used, 577760K free, 161836K cached PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 23757 jorel 15 0 968 964 776 R 0.9 0.3 0:00 top 1 root 6 0 544 508 476 S 0.0 0.1 0:30 init 2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:05 keventd 3 root 19 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:03 ksoftirqd_CPU0 4 root 19 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:03 ksoftirqd_CPU1 5 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 1:14 kswapd 6 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 bdflush 7 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:21 kupdated 107 daemon 9 0 136 56 56 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 portmap 271 root 9 0 356 324 288 S 0.0 0.1 0:08 syslogd 273 root 9 0 272 148 148 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 klogd 361 root 8 0 176 108 108 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 inetd 370 root 9 0 260 176 128 S 0.0 0.0 0:03 cron 373 daemon 9 0 132 64 64 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 atd 391 root 9 0 172 108 108 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 getty 392 root 9 0 172 108 108 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 getty 393 root 9 0 172 108 108 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 getty 394 root 9 0 172 108 108 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 getty 11737 root 9 0 184 148 148 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 dhcpcd 9485 root 9 0 388 324 324 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 getty 12216 root 9 0 556 476 456 S 0.0 0.1 0:12 gpm 23692 jorel 12 0 1392 1392 1064 S 0.0 0.5 0:00 bash Can someone explain to me why (1) I am swapping even though the RSS column adds up to a small fraction of 256MB (2) Why the summary stats say I'm using 229MB even though there isnt anything running that accounts for that memory usage? The kernel is 2.4.16 - if it matters. Thanks, Jor-el