On 29/04/07, somethin2cool <somethin2cool@yahoo.com> wrote:
even though i'm not running anything.
[snip]
This is a paste from my laptop, running with a good 2gb of RAM
tolecnal@luna:/mnt$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2028 1971 56 0 73 1206
-/+ buffers/cache: 691 1336
Swap: 509 1 507
[/snip]
As you can see from this, my system is using ~97% of its total memory.
But still I'm not worried, as Linux handles memory in a quite
different approach than per say Windows. Seeing such high memory uses
is not uncommon and all, is more the rule than the exception. Linux
likes to reserve memory blocks before they are needed, so that when
the memory blocks are needed they are already taken and ready to be
assigned. This in return makes the overhead lower. It's when you see
your hard drive swap like mad when you know you either;
a) run a very memory intensive application
b) a program/process has run amok and leaks like a sill
c) you have too little system memory
In your case, running a system without a swap partition is not good in
any means! But a lesson learnt hopefully to the next time you set up a
Debian (or any other Linux system for that matter) system.