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Home > Archive > Linux/Unix > June 2003 > Linux eating RAM and not using swap!!
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Linux eating RAM and not using swap!!
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| fatchronos 2003-05-30, 12:39 am |
| Hey guys...
wondering if anyone can help me with this.. i have 512mb of ram and 1gb of swap allocated...
right, so when i boot linux, cat of /proc/meminfo says i have about 490mb of ram left. not bad!
i start Xwindows... with KDE, maybe 100 or so more MB are taken up... no problems...
but when i quit these programs, i don't get the RAM back...
as soon as i open a few things, maybe compile a program or two, my RAM is all completely gone! and it hovers between 4mb and 20mb. even if i close everything, I dont get any ram back!!
also, it doesnt utilize the swapspace at all. meminfo constantly tells me that the entire 1gb of swap is unused. i tried making the swap size smaller and larger, but no difference
can anyone tell me whats going on here? i ahve kernel 2.4.20... do i need some sort of memory management software? this seems like very odd behaviour to me... thanks | |
| neuralfx 2003-05-30, 7:33 pm |
| That seems normal; are you noticing a lag in performance? If not, then that's pretty normal.
-neural | |
| ccieToBe 2003-05-30, 10:09 pm |
| This is normal. Linux does a much better job of memory management then Windows, so it goes about things differently. Typically memory is not actually freed until some other application needs it. The thinking here is that it takes close to zero time to clear those portions of memory that haven't been utilized in a while, but if you open up a program after closing it, it should open up significantly faster since it's still sitting in RAM. | |
| fatchronos 2003-06-01, 5:25 pm |
| now i see  thanks guys
so is there a way to see how much memory is actually in use? I can't tell if i need to get more RAM or not | |
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| fatchronos 2003-06-01, 10:07 pm |
| Thanks, ill try them
btw 'free' doesnt tell me how much is active, only how much is used |
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