Jor-el <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
J> Here is the output of 'top' on my system :
J>
J> 23:52:59 up 23 days, 13:21, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
J> 22 processes: 21 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
J> CPU states: 0.6% user, 0.4% system, 0.0% nice, 99.1% idle
J> Mem: 255804K total, 229276K used, 26528K free, 10584K buffers
J> Swap: 586144K total, 8384K used, 577760K free, 161836K cached
J> Can someone explain to me why (1) I am swapping even though the
J> RSS column adds up to a small fraction of 256MB (2) Why the summary stats
J> say I'm using 229MB even though there isnt anything running that accounts
J> for that memory usage? The kernel is 2.4.16 - if it matters.
(1) has been explained pretty adequately already, I think. The key
bit of (2) is understanding the first couple of lines of the 'top'
output (which are formatted oddly to fit on the screen):
Total memory: 255804K
Free memory: 26528K
Used memory: 229276K
Buffers: 10584K
(Disk) Cache: 161836K
Processes: 56856K (not displayed)
IOW, well over half of your physical memory is being used for disk
cache, which is a perfectly fine thing for otherwise idle system
resources to be doing.
--
David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
