How to optimise memory use?

[Chris Owen]

Hello again,

I am trying to get a useable debian 3.0 installation going on an old Pentium laptop with 16MB RAM. I have re-compiled my kernel to include only what I think are the essentials, and cut out most unnecessary background processes. But even without running any useful programs, and without running X or anything, I find that free gives my physical memory usage at nearly 11MB:

# free

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 14876 10888 3988 7824 504 6448
-/+ buffers/cache: 3936 10940
Swap: 65516 584 64932


The processes that were running when I did this were:

# ps

PID TTY TIME CMD
1 ? 00:00:05 init
2 ? 00:00:00 kflushd
3 ? 00:00:00 kupdate
4 ? 00:00:00 kswapd
5 ? 00:00:00 keventd
91 ? 00:00:00 portmap
148 ? 00:00:00 syslogd
151 ? 00:00:01 klogd
156 ? 00:00:00 rpc.statd
162 ? 00:00:00 apmd
189 ? 00:00:00 inetd
209 ? 00:00:00 lpd
232 ? 00:00:00 cardmgr
295 ? 00:00:00 dhclient-2.2.x
319 tty1 00:00:00 bash
320 tty2 00:00:00 getty
321 tty3 00:00:00 getty
322 tty4 00:00:00 getty
323 tty5 00:00:00 getty
324 tty6 00:00:00 getty
407 tty1 00:00:00 ps


Of course, if I start to run X, even with the lightest window manager, things are horribly slow and thrashing in and out of swap before I even try to run any useful application.

Is this the best I can expect from linux? What the heck is using all my memory? Needless to say Win95 runs fine on this machine, at least until I start a heavy-duty application... Any ideas on how to reduce this basic memory consumption?

Thanks

Chris



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