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Re: [Sheflug] Eating up RAM
Nicola Richmond wrote:
> Having run the system monitor, it appears that my RAM is getting all
> used up and never released. At present, I am running a couple of monitor
> applets the system monitor, I have evolution open and a terminal. 73% of
> my 640 MB RAM is being used and this figure is increasing as we speak.
Have you run top? You can see how much memory each task is using,
and you can spot where the leak is. On the other hand, you might be
looking at cached disk. On my 256 Mb box, running KDE, a few konsoles,
xemacs and so on, the free command gives this:
$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 250 246 4 0 21 113
[...]
Meaning that there are about 113 Mb of memory used as a cache, and
about 130 megs of memory being used by applications.
you should only start worrying about memory consumption when the
swap starts being used. You can usually see this in top as the task
kswapd starts taking more and more time. You can also notice the hard
disk groaning :-) Other than that, the high memory usage merely states
that Linux is using the available memory efficiently as a cache. As
new tasks require more memory, they use cache memory.
I'm sure someone can come up with a better explanation of how this
all works :-)
José
--
José L Gómez Dans PhD student
Tel: +44 114 222 5582 Radar & Communications Group
FAX; +44 870 132 2990 Department of Electronic Engineering
University of Sheffield UK
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