on Sun, Jul 27, 2003 at 08:39:38AM -0700, Alan Connor (alanconnor@earthlink.net) wrote: > > > I'm trying to figure out why my memory footprint is so large when I am running > NOTHING! > > Running Debian with a 2.4.19 kernel > > > 08:23:37 up 57 min, 3 users, load average: 0.51, 0.15, 0.05 > 18 processes: 17 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped > CPU states: 0.0% user, 0.2% system, 0.0% nice, 99.8% idle > Mem: 126528K total, 119212K used, 7316K free, 18932K buffers > Swap: 128484K total, 700K used, 127784K free, 45920K cached Of the 126,528 KiB on your system, 19MB is allocated to buffers, and another 46MB to disk cache -- or about 66MB total. So your actual utilization is ~45 MiB (119 MB - 66 MB). The command 'free' will show you the use of memory, with cache/buffers subtracted out. The rationale for this is: you have memory on your system. It might as well be used for something. Allocating memory to buffers and cache is far more useful than not using it at all. As others have said, if the memory is needed (by programs), then the cache/buffers will be flushed and allocated. Peace. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? The golden rule of technical design: complexity is the enemy.
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