George Roberts wrote:
I started using Linux again a couple of months ago. After I installed
Mandrake /noticed that if my computer sat idle over night the memory
usage went up from 100 megs to 2-300 megs ( I have 1 gig of ram, so no
biggie). I switched to Gentoo and have noticed the samething. After
watching this since then I have noticed that when my system is under a
load, ie large updates and such the "lost" memory is reclaimed. "Normal
memory usage" runs around 320 megs or so, after a large update 7
packages or more the memory used dropped down to 155 megs. My question is: is this typical? It is not causeing any issues with my computer. I just puzzles the snot
out of me why this is happening.
Linux tries to cache stuff into "idle" RAM when it can, since it really doesn't "cost" much to expire it and overwrite it, if it needs to.
Here is an message from the Fedora newsgroup that discusses it a little bit. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/25/2004/10/2/232225
Hope that this helps. Steve
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