Re: strange memory allocation
On Sat, Jun 19, 1999 at 03:47:25AM -0500, Luke Shulenburger wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Mem: 256720K av, 244176K used, 12544K free, 28200K shrd, 86584K buff
> Swap: 523640K av, 8744K used, 514896K free 103216K cached
>
> At this moment I was running nothing except several xterms, xwindows and a
> few daemons which take very little use. The X server has by far the
> largest memory requirement and it takes only 19MB of ram. Is there anyway
> for me to find out what program is using memory so inefficently that I
> have begun to use swap for day to day applications? This is most puzzling
> to me, so any help would be very appreciated.
The fact that your machine is using swap is no problem. Over those 3 weeks
your system has cached and buffer parts of the filesystem, programs and so
on in memory. At one time you've used cache and that's what this says. When
I have plenty of free memory available, some things are still swapped away.
There is nothing wrong with this behaviour.
Unless all programs are swapping, Linux loaded the memory to the max to
optize the performance. As long as no (other) program claims memory, the
information is still stored in memory.
You can read something about memory useage in free(1).
HTH,
B.
--
B. Warmerdam GNU/Debian Linux
bartw@xs4all.nl, bartw@debian.org (Keyid: 10A0FDD1) ----------------
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