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Re: why does the kernel suck up memory?



On Mon, Mar 30, 1998 at 10:04:12AM -0500, tko@westgac3.dragon.com wrote:
> I've noticed that when I added more memory, the extra memory went into
> "buffers". Why? I don't have a heavily loaded system which would require
> massive buffers. How can I change the kernel to stop with this unnecessary
> behavior?

	Think of those buffers as a dynamically growing cache that
	uses all available free memory on your machine. If some other
	process needs the memory the cache is shrunk. That's good
	behaviour there, nothing harmful.	

> I'm trying to keep from using swap space. Once a swap partition is accessed,
> it is never dropped and I need to _not_ access swap space for performance
> reasons (IO bandwidth).

	Some parts of memory are not normally needed. Once those
	are swapped out, they'll propably never be swapped out.
	It's better that way, it frees memory to be used as cache.
-- 
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