[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Etch becoming slower than Sarge?



On Sat 2007-01-06 23:52:22 -0500, Kamaraju Kusumanchi wrote:
> On Saturday 06 January 2007 19:52, Marko Randjelovic wrote:
> >
> > In fact, I never figured out how they manage to consume all that memory.
> > It must be they are working hard on it. :D
> 
> I have 1Gb ram and Etch still uses swap space (for god knows what).
> 
> $free -m
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:          1011        982         29          0        133        155
> -/+ buffers/cache:        694        317
> Swap:          953        103        849
> 
> I run everything from vnc. Most of my applications are memory hungry : KDE, 
> firefox, thunderbird etc., But this should not result in using swap space 
> continuously. When I reboot the computer everything looks fine. It uses about 
> 300 MB in the initial stages. After some days (say 5-10) it starts using swap 
> continuously.

What free shows above is quite normal. The kernel will swap out
little/non used process memory in favour of increased buffers and file
cache. This can make your machine more responsive when, for example,
browsing the filesystem, as it won't need to go to disk (so
much).

You actually have over 300MB free memory (the free memory in the second
row is equal to the sum of the free, buffers and cached memory in the
first row). The kernel could make this available very quickly to any
process that needed it, without touching swap.

For example, if you were to open a huge jpeg image your machine would
be able to do so quickly. If you then looked at the output of 'free -m'
you'd find that the buffers and cached used had dropped considerably.
After closing the image and using your machine normally for a while the
memory usage would settle down again to something like it is above.
 
> Besides being memory hungry, KDE applications spit out all sorts of errors 
> both on the konsole terminal and in .xsession-errors. Wonder if etch has been 
> tested as much as it should be...

Are you sure they're not warnings rather than errors?

-- 
David Hart <debian@tonix.org>



Reply to: