On Sunday 03 August 2003 16:29, Michael Torrie wrote: > 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 > Thanks, I'll file that info away for future reference. But I'm not the one who was having a problem, just inputting some info into the thread. Maybe he/she will read the posts and glean the necessary information. Joebewan -- Shrike-list mailing list Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
