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On Monday 29 December 2003 13:27, Steven Nelson wrote:
> I was thinking the disk cache was on the hard drive. Are u sure it
> is in the memory? I know in alot of the Windows versions I have
> used there was settings where you could enable a cache and set the
> size of it. You might be confused or I might be but I thought when
> memory was not used it is waiting for applications to use it or for
> when you use the applications that would be already enabled and
> they need more memory. 

This is where linux and windows handle things quite differently.  
Windows sets aside a memory area, and once that's filled up it starts 
writing to disk cache.  In linux, it sees memory rather like a pond 
that is fed by a stream.  Water (data) can flow into it as long as it 
is not full, but when it runs out of space it simply lets some run 
away (least likely to be needed data) to make room for the new.  If 
you have plenty of ram it will operate within that space for most of 
the time, barely touching your swap partition.  That's what happens 
on mine (512MB).  If it is really being worked hard, which is usually 
a short time, it will use the ram and the swap, but it will still 
handle it much more efficiently than windows does.  It is a 
completely different system.

> I didn't think applications should use that
> much of the memory. Almost all of the memory is gone because the
> applications are using it. If I run out of memory then I will not
> be able to use the computer correctly and it will freeze. 

Believe me, it wont <g>  My memory usage goes close to the 512MB 
within an hour or two of booting up, but I have run for weeks at a 
time and never had a problem caused by memory shortage.

> Won't
> other applications need the memory? 

Yes, and it will be released as necessary.

> The swap space is not being
> used at all. 

That shows that it is working well.

> That is the problem, on all of the terminals that are
> avaible with Mandrake 9.2 none of them will let the left click menu
> appear. When I used Mandrake 9.1 there was one terminal that had
> that feature, it is not with Mandrake 9.2. 

I'm not sure what you mean by this one, Seven, and since I don't use 
9.2 I'll let someone else try to answer that.

> Is the Konquerer file
> you mentioned the same as the Lilo? Do I need to get both? I booted
> the enterprise kernel and it read the 1024mb of memory right. That
> helped with how much memory is being used, there is still around
> 360mb being used. I would think that is to much but if you are
> right about the programs using that much memory, I guess not. If it
> helps, the questions that are have are in the paragraph. Some of
> them do not have question marks at the end of them and are
> questions within a regular sentence. You should be able to
> understand the paragraph and what the questions are if you
> understand what is happening with the memory problem.
>
Apart from that one bit, I understood your concerns.  Believe me, I 
remember how difficult it is to come to terms with such a fundamental 
difference <g>.  I'm glad that the enterprise kernel appears to be 
working well for you, and I hope that my explanations have made 
things clearer.  I think your terminal question is a different thing, 
though, and it may help to start another thread with a subject 
directly relating to that, as others may be ignoring this thread, 
thinking that Derek and I are dealing with it.

HTH

Anne
- -- 
Registered Linux User No.293302
Have you visited http://twiki.mdklinuxfaq.org yet?
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