At 06:39 AM 10/25/00 +0200, you wrote:
As long as I had 128 megs there were ~ 3 megs free with some 60 megs used for buffers. Now I have 320 megs ram, but only about 150 are used for buffers, 100 are free.total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 321784 224244 97540 11820 155660 10608 -/+ buffers/cache: 57976 263808 Swap: 128516 80436 48080
Thats a helluva lot of ram for a workstation! You're only using 57 Mb of ram, but 47 Mb of swap in there... Is there something bizzaire about the machine's uptime? Has it been running for months or something? Do you run netscape on it a lot? Are there many zombie tasks or inordinately memory-hungry tasks running?
What can I do to increase the amount of ram used for buffering/caching so that only 5-10 % are left free? (Or would that be a "bad idea" (tm)?)
It makes good sense to me - but perhaps (and I'm guessing) theres a process that says "I might want to alloc lots of ram fast" Perhaps someone else in the list can comment better.
If I´m not mistaken the whole swapped-out pages should acutually fit into the free ram, so swapping here seems rather, umm, less than optimal?
Well - theres always stuff that gets swapped out because it hasn't been needed for ages, imagine if you had a scsi card driver in your kernel (ignore modules) that either didn't find its hardware, or you have a scsi card that you haven't used since the system has booted. Theres some allocated memory that can be paged out to leave free ram for when its needed.
The system is an up-to-date potato Linux cruncher 2.2.15 #1 Thu Jun 1 10:47:16 EST 2000 i686 unknown
Its not up-to-date if its not running the latest kernel in the range - 2.2.17 at the moment :)
But I don't recall any memory-related changes there.
TIA for every hint (and FM to R ;),
I've had this one sitting in my in-box for a bit, waiting for responses.... I'm interested to know.
-- Criggie
