On 10/1/2013 5:13 PM, Catherine Gramze wrote:
I have also looked at my memory usage. At this very moment, not running
WoW, I have 5.22 gig being used. 4 gig would not be sufficient for me.
You would be correct if the number you're looking at reflected
application memory usage. But it doesn't. On any of the modern
operating systems one must damn near be a computer scientist to see the
actual memory usage. The 5.22GB, this is on Debian, yes? The system
monitor? This reports process and cache memory usage. The buffer/cache
will literally eat nearly all available memory all the time on Linux,
then free some when an application process needs it. I've never used
OSX but it's probably similar in its desktop reporting tool.
This will really throw you for a loop. Open a shell window and execute
~$ sudo echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
Wait a few seconds and see what happens to that 5.22GB number. Then
report back what you find. You can do this while playing WOW as well.
That number will drop like a rock and WOW will keep on going, because
the memory you're freeing with that command is cache. And again, Linux
will eat nearly all RAM for cache if the system is up long enough.