On Thu, 2003-04-24 at 02:26, Jason KRISCH wrote:
> Is anyone else seeing this:
>
> My laptop has 512MB RAM. When I first boot into X, about 25% of my
> memory is being used - I can live with that. Then I open some apps, say
> Mozilla, and I jump up to 59% memory utilization. If I close all the
> running apps, my % of memory utilization NEVER decreases. If I open up
> apps again, it just gets worse and "builds" from where it was. Today
> the laptop was running for about 8 or 9 hours and before I shut it down
> I was pegged at 100% memory utilization with no apps running. I used
> top and the system monitor to try to figure out what was using all of
> it, but nothing really stood out as using a lot. I plan on doing some
> more digging and trying to figure out where / what the problem is - I
> just thought I would throw this out there to see if anyone else is
> experiencing similar issues.
As Eric replied, this is perfectly normal behavior and does not a
represent a problem. The additional memory is used by the cache of
files from your hard drive. It's one of the killer features of Linux
that makes it so fast sometimes. When frequently-accessed files are
accessed a second time, they are read from the memory cache instead of
having to access the hard drive again.
Take a look at the output of "free" on my system, for example:
total used free
Mem: 384216 374216 10000
-/+ buffers/cache: 202072 182144
Swap: 313228 87964 225264
[I deleted the three right columns]
This is a system with 384 MB of RAM. About 374MB is being used, and
10MB free. But then look at the next line, "-/+ buffers/cache:".
That's the amount of memory that's actually being used by programs. In
my case, 202 MB is being used by programs and 182MB is available for
other programs. When additional programs require memory, the amount
available for caching is decreased, and if you start using a LOT, then
no caching occurs.
My system is also using about 87 of it's 313 MB swap partition, too.
Even though there's 182 MB of RAM memory free for applications, some
things that I haven't used in a long time have been swapped out to make
room for cache. Linux is pretty efficient about this -- it always does
things to make them faster!
--Jeremy
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