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Re: Do not empty the RAM



On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 12:47:46AM +0200, Emil Carlsson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a small problem... after keeping my system up for only 48 hours... and 
> not doing anything heavy on it (some websurfing, playing music, chatting and 
> some downloading) my RAM fills up... the programs I use are bittornado, mozilla 
> firefox, gaim, mozilla thunderbird and xmms... and sometimes xine... do you 
> have any tip on what might be faulty or that I should download something that 
> will empty the ram for me... because I have never had this sort of problem with 
> it before... I run unstable programs on it and use a 2.6 kernel
> 
You misunderstand the way that the Linux kernel manages memory.  It will
not reclaim memory until it runs out of space.  This is because if you
need something that was already in memory, then it costs nothing to
simply refer back to that which is already in memory.  If the memory
were automatically reclaimed after some idle period of time and you
then referenced the same information, it would need to be returned to
memeory, which is a waste of resources.  There is nothing wrong with
your system.  You know that it fills up the RAM completely if you start
using swap space.  That is when you might want to worry.

-Roberto

-- 
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto

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