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Re: Building computer



On Wed, 2 Oct 2013 10:42:57 -0400
Rhiamom <rhiamom@gmail.com> wrote:

> > On Oct 2, 2013, at 4:59 AM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> wrote

...

> > 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 was in OS X. The memory use would be similar in Debian, I assume. About 
> a quarter of the used memory was "inactive" which I assume was the cache. Still
> too close for comfort for me, as WoW was not running, nor ventrilo, and WoW 
> does background downloads of the almost-weekly patches while you play, so even 
> more processes.

It may be necessary to be a computer scientist to understand stuff like
VIRT / RES / SHR, but it's trivial to separate out process and cache
usage - one just looks at the second, rather than first, line of 'free'
output.

Celejar


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