RAM usage

[amcmorl at gmail.com (Angus McMorland)]

Hi all,

I've made a debian live CD to allow me to perform some modelling. The
machines I have available to play with have 2 GB of RAM, which is
normally a lot more than enough to run my work. However, debian live's
tmpfs (I presume) seems to be taking up about >1 GB of that RAM, which
(1) surprises me that so much is needed, and (2) doesn't leave enough
RAM for my modelling.

Under the debian live boot, free reports:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        906588     287164     619424          0      41908     173652
-/+ buffers/cache:      71604     834984
Swap:            0          0          0

and df -h reports:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
unionfs               736M  303M  434M  42% /
tmpfs                 443M     0  443M   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                   10M  104K  9.9M   2% /dev
tmpfs                 443M  4.0K  443M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/scd0             303M  303M     0 100% /live/image
tmpfs                 443M  9.6M  434M   3% /live/cow
tmpfs                 443M   32K  443M   1% /tmp

I'm not sure I understand this all correctly, but if I do, then I
don't have any requirement for that much avail space in / or /tmp. Is
there any way to reduce the boot's memory footprint, or free the
available space back to the system's memory, for use by programs?

Thanks,

Angus.
-- 
AJC McMorland, PhD Student
Physiology, University of Auckland