Re: Memory usage on debian
On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 04:30:56PM +0100, Nils-Erik Svangård wrote:
> My system use about 95% of my 512 mb ram, but ps aux and top doesent
> show which process that eats all the memory.
Maybe the memory is used for the disk cache/cache buffers --- free and
top can display that. Afair, it's possible to set up how much RAM the
system should try to keep free by echo'ing some command into some file
residing in /proc or so, but I don't remember how to do that
exactly.
Anyway, that the system makes use of the available memory to great
extent is normal. That is just what all the memory is for :) In your
case, the memory seems to be used for file caching --- if it is not,
then something may actually be wrong since it doesn't seem to be used
by the processes either.
In case more memory is needed by a process or when starting a new
process, the system may reduce the cache size automatically to
fullfill the demand. Thus, increasing the amount of memory the system
should keep free can speed up fullfilling the demand, but for the
cache size is constantly decreased to keep some memory unused that
might be (eventually, at some time) needed quickly (or not at all) the
actual gain is usually not significant enough to make the tweaking
worthwhile. It is just for fullfilling such sudden demands of memory
that the system keeps some of it free.
yun:~> free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 502 496 5 0 88 258
^^^ ^^^^^
-/+ buffers/cache: 149 352
Swap: 413 320 93
GH
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