On Sat 2007-01-06 23:52:22 -0500, Kamaraju Kusumanchi wrote: > On Saturday 06 January 2007 19:52, Marko Randjelovic wrote: > > > > In fact, I never figured out how they manage to consume all that memory. > > It must be they are working hard on it. :D > > I have 1Gb ram and Etch still uses swap space (for god knows what). > > $free -m > total used free shared buffers cached > Mem: 1011 982 29 0 133 155 > -/+ buffers/cache: 694 317 > Swap: 953 103 849 > > I run everything from vnc. Most of my applications are memory hungry : KDE, > firefox, thunderbird etc., But this should not result in using swap space > continuously. When I reboot the computer everything looks fine. It uses about > 300 MB in the initial stages. After some days (say 5-10) it starts using swap > continuously.
What free shows above is quite normal. The kernel will swap out little/non used process memory in favour of increased buffers and file cache. This can make your machine more responsive when, for example, browsing the filesystem, as it won't need to go to disk (so much). You actually have over 300MB free memory (the free memory in the second row is equal to the sum of the free, buffers and cached memory in the first row). The kernel could make this available very quickly to any process that needed it, without touching swap. For example, if you were to open a huge jpeg image your machine would be able to do so quickly. If you then looked at the output of 'free -m' you'd find that the buffers and cached used had dropped considerably. After closing the image and using your machine normally for a while the memory usage would settle down again to something like it is above. > Besides being memory hungry, KDE applications spit out all sorts of errors > both on the konsole terminal and in .xsession-errors. Wonder if etch has been > tested as much as it should be... Are you sure they're not warnings rather than errors? -- David Hart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
