Re: Memory

[Matthew Daubenspeck <matt@oddprocess.org>]

On Tue, Jul 02, 2002 at 02:21:08PM -0600, Gary Hennigan wrote:
> "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.

Thanks for both of the replies. I will watch it closely...


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