umm... setting mem=512M will limit you to 512M of total physical memory, it will not limit the swap usage. so having more memory than that will hurt you (the extra RAM is thrown away).
in linux 2.6 you can have either swap=2X to 3X MEM, or no swap at all. i tried the no swap deal for a while, no amazing lockups or anything. but it kinda me nervous to exercise the OOM killer. large memory footprint is nothing new, X consumes quite a bit because it mmap's the AGP buffer window into its own address space (this is usually 64MB). i've had 384MB for well-nigh five years now, and the performance never bothered me. am using FC2 and gnome 2.x now. if you obsess over top, you will never be happy with the memory usage. just use the machine and forget about the memory. memory is cheap. that said, 128MB is painful. not recommended. On Apr 8, 2005 7:48 PM, Paolo Alexis Falcone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Apr 8, 2005 7:37 PM, Shae Tan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I am basically a GUI person. Lately, I observed that desktop > > environments are using too much memory. For example, my KDE reveals in > > "top": > > > > Mem: 516036k total, 512348k used, 3688k free, 183688k buffers > > Swap: 1060248k total, 916k used, 1059332k free, 98500k cached > > > > I want to know what PLUG members are using for their desktops and how > > they manage the memory used by these GUIs. Do you recommend that I buy > > another 512mb of RAM? > > > > This is my system: Linux localhost 2.6.8.1-24mdk AMD Athlon(tm) > > [XP2200] prosussor GNU/Linux > > By default, a protected-memory OS would "gulp" the entire memory space > unto itself, then use that memory for allocation with your userland > programs. > > But yeah, modern-day desktop environments do take a lot of memory, > considering what they do these days (that you can't do in the early > days). > > -- > Paolo Alexis Falcone > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- > Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List > [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) > Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph > Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph > . > To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug > . > Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to > http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie > -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
