Chris Owen said on Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 04:41:47PM +0000: > without running X or anything, I find that free gives my physical memory > usage at nearly 11MB: > > # free > > total used free shared buffers cached > Mem: 14876 10888 3988 7824 504 6448 > -/+ buffers/cache: 3936 10940 > Swap: 65516 584 64932 You misread the output of free (don't worry, it's a very common mistake). You've actually got about 10MB free; most of what you're seeing is actually buffers and cache. Those will get dumped as you need to load software, but otherwise they're a good thing; you want most of your memory in use, and Linux tries hard to keep "free" memory occupied with cache. > 156 ? 00:00:00 rpc.statd Are you using NFS? If not, you don't need this one (it's from the nfs-common package). > 209 ? 00:00:00 lpd You can probably do without this one, too, unless you need it for a print server. If you like lpr printing, try rlpr instead: no daemon required. > 320 tty2 00:00:00 getty > 321 tty3 00:00:00 getty > 322 tty4 00:00:00 getty > 323 tty5 00:00:00 getty > 324 tty6 00:00:00 getty You can ditch some of these getty's by commenting them out in /etc/inittab. Be sure to leave at least one (I like to leave two). > Is this the best I can expect from linux? What the heck is using all my > memory? Needless to say Win95 runs fine on this machine, at least until > I start a heavy-duty application... Any ideas on how to reduce this > basic memory consumption? As I said: it's mostly buffers, and you shouldn't worry about it, but you can get rid of some of those daemons to free up a few more bits. M
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