On Sun, 2003-08-03 at 13:52, Price Technology wrote: > [joebewan@xxxxx joebewan]$ free > total used free shared buffers cached > Mem: 384556 367488 17068 0 54820 217252 > -/+ buffers/cache: 95416 289140 > Swap: 522104 26388 495716 > > Is that what you're looking for ?? Yep. Essentially (if I read it right), you have 289 MB of your ram free, so really your programs are only consuming a small percentage of your ram. Linux uses free ram for buffers and caching, for performance increases. The swap is often high because Linux aggressively uses swap, even when there's plenty of ram. Basically it works on the theory of a working set. The theory is that programs only frequently use a small number of the memory pages that they have allocated, so we can swap the rest out, leaving more room for buffers, cache, and other programs. Most linux users do misread their memory usage statistics at first. As long as your swap isn't too full, then you're fine. The performance issues that you notice are related to 2 things. A lot of it has to do with the X server and it's asynchronous nature. This means that the redraws are often queued up and don't happen instantaneously. The other problem is that X is single-threaded (which isn't the problem in itself), which, due to the way the linux scheduler works, causes the kernel to schedule it in such a way that it appears to stutter (causes music to skip, etc). If you try the 2.6 test2 kernel, I think you'll find your X11 applications appear to be much smoother and faster. Also X11 shouldn't cause other applications to stall like xmms. Michael > > Joebewan -- Michael Torrie <torriem@xxxxxxxxxxxx> -- Shrike-list mailing list Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
