>>>>> "Marco" == Marco Shaw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Marco> I just found a useful command, 'free', here's what my
Marco> computer tells me while I'm running Netscape 4.04:
[...]
Marco> ...all mixed up due to the space limitation, but it seems
Marco> like I only have 672 of 30,816 kb of RAM left (in 1,024 block
Marco> format)! Not good! That may explain Netscape's instability.
Marco> I should look at my startup daemons and consider their
Marco> removal.
Marco> Any comments?
Sigh. This is an FAQ. I really think we could do with a periodic
posting.
Completely unused RAM is wasted RAM. Otherwise unused RAM is used to
cache disk blocks. When a program needs some memory, the request is
fulfilled from the "free" RAM. The kernel then flushes disk blocks to
free up some more RAM, ready to fulfil the next request.
Detail:
It's done this way so that memory requests can usualy be fulfilled
quickly. If a program requests more memory than is currently free,
it has to wait until the disk blocks have been flushed. (Only
"dirty" blocks need to be flushed by written out to disk. Blocks
that hav not been modified can just be dropped since the kernel
knows that the on-disk copy is the same).
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