On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, Steven downing wrote:
> I've very recently installed RH Linux on a cyrix686 133 with 32 MB ram. I
> did a normal Gnome workstation install to get started with, and 80Mb
> swap. It's only use is as a home PC.
>
> The problem is that something seems to be hogging my memory. If I inspect
> /proc/meminfo straight after log-in I get about 3Mb free, i.e 28MB in
> use.
This is quite normal. Here's the stats from the box I'm on now {not mine}
cat /proc/meminfo
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 264105984 258236416 5869568 191336448 21643264 104157184
Swap: 131600384 12898304 118702080
MemTotal: 257916 kB
MemFree: 5732 kB
MemShared: 186852 kB
Buffers: 21136 kB
Cached: 101716 kB
SwapTotal: 128516 kB
SwapFree: 115920 kB
As you can see - 5 meg of free RAM - but of the physical RAM, more than
half is cache, and 200 meg out of 256 is buffers.
Try typing "top", and getting a better output. You should get something
like this {along with a list of running processes}
11:55am up 26 days, 7:36, 62 users, load average: 0.30, 0.18, 0.11
272 processes: 267 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 3 stopped
CPU states: 3.7% user, 5.6% system, 0.1% nice, 90.4% idle
Mem: 257916K av, 248344K used, 9572K free, 192068K shrd, 20700K buff
Swap: 128516K av, 12596K used, 115920K free 96052K cached
As you can see - this machine is using the majority of its memory for
either caching, or shared memory.
I wouldn't panic about it - an indicator of when your physical RAM is
being overutilised is by looking at how much SWAP you use - if you
regularly use 40 meg of SWAP, then you need more RAM - badly. But if you
only ever use a couple of K, your physical RAM is not too badly off.
DaZZa
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