Re: Memory

["Gary Hennigan" <glhenni@sandia.gov>]

"Andrew Agno" <agno@AI.SRI.COM> writes:
> Matthew Daubenspeck writes:
>  > I have been having some problems with my system eating up memory
>  > lately. I ran top to check the memory status..
> 
> The numbers you have don't look bad at all.  It's when you start
> eating up large amounts of swap that you need to look into a problem.
> So if you're disk isn't thrashing when you're doing whatever you're
> doing, I wouldn't worry about it.

Linux uses much (all?) of the available free memory for disk cache,
but releases this memory when/if an application requests memory. So if
you're system is healthy and you've been doing lots of file-system
activity you should see almost all the memory being used. Like Andrew
writes, the only time to worry is if Linux doesn't release memory when
an application requests it and start going to swap.

In other words, you can't say that something is eating memory unless
you're trying to run an application and that app can't allocate
sufficient memory, assuming it's allocation request is reasonable
given your hardware.

Gary


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