On Sun, Mar 28, 1999 at 05:52:24PM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
> "free" is misleading. After you've been running for a bit and several
> processes have been run and closed, their code & data persist in memory
> in case they are needed again. If anything new needs memory, then the
> memory space of something not in use is reclaimed. So the net result is
> that (a) it looks as though your memory is full, because "free" adds up
> all this idle stuff; (b) you will notice an improvement in performance
> because of this; (c) you shouldn't find that new processes encounter
> memory problems.
>
> To test this, start something big for the first time since last boot. It
> will probably take several seconds before you see it starting to run.
> Then close it, and restart it. You should find that it starts up much
> faster the second time, because it's already in memory. Then start
> somnething else big, and close it, and then restart the first big one.
> Depending on how much RAM you have, you may find that it once again takes
> a long time to get going because the second one pinched the memory the
> first was using.
>
> "ps", on the other hand, only adds up memory used by active processes,
> so it almost always tells you that much less memory is in use.
I thought this was accounted for in the line which mentioned +/- buffers,
but guess not; thanks! There isn't a command which adds takes account for
this caching and reports memory free to programs is there (or should I
write a little script to do this?).
thanks,
--
Chris
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