Re: more on memory problem

[brian moore <bem@cmc.net>]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 06:15:48PM -0500, Ken Weingold wrote:
> If it helps, here is the top readout.  There really is not much
> running:
> 
> 
>   6:13pm  up 20 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
> 27 processes: 26 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
> CPU states:  0.1% user,  0.1% system,  0.0% nice, 99.6% idle
> Mem:  517500K av,  49412K used, 468088K free,  14644K shrd,  22516K buff
> Swap: 498004K av,      0K used, 498004K free                  6324K cached

You're using 49M, roughly.  Of that 49M, a bunch is the below
processes, but you're also using 22.5M for buffers and 6.3M for cache.
That's just under 30M.... add in the shared memory (which is tricky,
because it's also charged to each process using it), and the numbers are
very much believable.   (Shared memory is [mostly] your dynamically
loaded libraries -- since dozens or even hundreds of processes will want
to have libc and other common libraries, the library itself is only
mapped into memory once which saves a ton of memory and even speeds up
program loading.)

See http://www.linuxdoc.org/FAQ/Linux-FAQ/x1925.html#AEN2027

You still have far more memory in this machine than it needs.  (ie, it
is presently wasting 468M by not using it as cache or buffers since your
disk activity is not high enough to justify it.)

-- 
CueCat decoder .signature by Larry Wall:
#!/usr/bin/perl -n
printf "Serial: %s Type: %s Code: %s\n", map { tr/a-zA-Z0-9+-/ -_/; $_ = unpack
'u', chr(32 + length()*3/4) . $_; s/\0+$//; $_ ^= "C" x length; } /\.([^.]+)/g;