Memory management on Fedora6

[Phil Meyer]

Takatsugu Kobayashi wrote:
> Hi, Linux newbie here.
>
> I have been using Fedora6 x86_64 for 2 months now and am very happy 
> with this package.
>
> I have just noticed that my memory usage does not diminish as I think 
> I free up memory by closing applications, etc. I was using Windows 
> before migrating into Linux, but on Windows memory was freed up by 
> closing applications and by removing inputs from memory cells. How can 
> I free up memory on Linux?
>
> Also, I tried Suse 10.2 before using Fedora6. For some reason, 
> response time was better on Suse. It looks like opening Mozilla and 
> Openoffice applications takes a while..... Does anyone notice this 
> difference in response time?
>
> My system configuration is
>
> CPU: Athlon X2 5200 AM2 (not overclocked)
> RAM: Wintec DDR2 800 4GB
> GPU: Nvidia Geforce 6150 Onboard
>
> Any suggestions for memory management or is this something I don't 
> have to worry about?
>
> Thank you very much.
>
> Taka
>

You have been bamboozled into an incorrect way of looking at what an 
operating system should do with free memory. :)

use the command: free
To get an idea of what is happening.

If you like pictures, look here at my x86_64 system memory usage as 
reported by munin:

http://themeyerfarm.com/munin/localhost/localhost-memory.html

The point to remember with UNIX and Linux, is that all modern kernels 
will attempt to use all available memory to its best advantage at all times.

In the chart from munin, free memory is represented by dark blue.  You 
will notice that as soon as the system has free memory, any activity 
that requires disk cache, or other cache, will eat it up.  As it should.

Those charts also represent memory being push 'up' towards the top of 
the chart, even beyond available RAM in some instances.  The bright 
green is actually application memory, and usually represents much less 
than half of available RAM on my quite active system.

For servers, munin is great.

Good luck!