Kelerion wrote: > Hi guys.. hoping someone can explain something to me here.. > > I have just upgraded my RH9 box to 1Gb DDR.. I thought, rather > presumptuously that this might give me a little more space to play > with memory wise.. but after looking through 'top' I get the > following: > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > 108 processes: 107 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped > CPU states: 4.4% user 2.0% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait > 93.6% idle Mem: 1030908k av, 1021332k used, 9576k free, 0k > shrd, 37020k buff > 801620k actv, 27560k in_d, 21440k in_c > Swap: 1020116k av, 14660k used, 1005456k free > 804884k cached > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > This doesn't make much sense to me.. as there is absolutely nothing > showing anywhere else in top that explains why '1021332k used' should > be appropriate.. > > can someone explain to me why putting double the amount of ram in a > machine causes RH to chew it all up and not tell you why? (joking: I > know it's probably not doing that and I am just missing a point > somewhere) >
Craig, Most of your memory is used in cache. There is a line from your top output that shows 804884k in cache. That's ~800MB of your memory being used. This memory is not allocated to processes, that's why you can't make it add up by looking at the process list and the memory being used. The cache is used for I/O buffering among other things. Linux uses this method to speed up file reads by having as much as possible in cache. If a process needs more memory or if a new process comes in that needs some memory, Linux automatically pulls things out of cache and frees that memory up for the processes. If you do a 'free' command from the command line, you will see that there is a middle line that say -/+ buffers/cache which gives you the memory usage without the buffers and cache taken into consideration. That middle line is a fairly accurate display of what memory is available for processes on your system. It's kind of nice to see all your memory go to good use! :) .~. Brad Sites /V\ Systems Administrator // \\ Missouri Employers Mutual Insurance /( )\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.mem-ins.com ^^-^^ (573) 499-4230 -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
