Celejar <cele...@gmail.com> writes: > Your numbers are much too high.
Maybe it's because I've been more looking at the virtual memory that top shows. What's actually resident can be much less. Still: ,---- [ top ] | PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND | 14529 lee 20 0 4755m 4.1g 12m S 1.3 52.9 1:27.93 gimp | 3956 lee 20 0 1794m 886m 56m S 4.3 11.1 10:29.61 seamonkey-bin | 5101 lee 20 0 1010m 866m 49m R 93.1 10.8 64:43.58 x3 `---- That's gimp with a scan of a double-page of a paperback (a lot smaller than an A4 page), converted to rgb colorspace after loading, my normal seamonkey which I have pretty much always open and X3 running for a short while. I have "vm.swappiness=80" in /etc/sysctl.conf because I rather have unused stuff swapped out than keeping it in memory. X3 will go up to over 3GB virtual and, IIRC, about 1.2--1.5GB resident if you play long enough. (Don't buy it, it's got too many bugs.) ,---- | lee@yun:~$ free | total used free shared buffers cached | Mem: 8196628 8000492 196136 0 16412 877004 | -/+ buffers/cache: 7107076 1089552 | Swap: 62496764 69932 62426832 | lee@yun:~$ `---- With 2GB RAM, I do recommend having a lot more swapspace than only 4GB, as well as with more RAM. I know it doesn't really help you; what it does is slowing the system down so /you/ can decide which process you want to kill before the system makes the decision itself. A couple days ago I talked to someone who had a 4GB laptop running Ubuntu. They had 250MB swap space. It's a brilliant idea: If the disk sustains 50MB/sec, it takes 5 seconds before the swap space is full and the killing starts and the system may go down. 8GB swap space? *If* you are at the keyboard when it happens and *if* you are fast enough with killing something ... 60GB? Overdone, I guess, but I doesn't hurt me, and it might take all night and I can kill something when I wake up. If you want to play, compile the attachment with 'gcc -O2 mem.c -o mem' and run something like './mem 20 20'. That allocates 20MB and does nothing with it and another 20MB it fills with char 58. That will show that you can basically allocate as much memory as you want as long as you don't use it without anything happening and that the system will start swapping when you allocate enough RAM *and* use it. You can try to bring your system down with that, just allocate enough memory and wait for a critical process to be killed. I've made such experiments 16 years ago and it worked :)
mem.c.bz2
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-- Debian testing amd64
