Memory

[Anne Wilson]

On Tuesday 09 June 2009 10:52:26 Yoram Halberstam wrote:
> All,
>
> I'm new to linux and I've got a FC10 with no server database or other
> servers (that I can think of) up yet - SAMBA maybe.
>
> Anyway, my memory last night was up to 2GB - I expected a basic system to
> be 500m or less...?!
>
Linux handles memory quite differently from windows.  It uses what is 
available, releasing it as required.  It's not unusual to see that you appear 
to have high usage.  If it's not causing problems, it should be ignored.  One 
thing worth looking at is to open a konsole and type 'top'.  Look at the 
header part and you should see something like

Mem:   2072916k total,  1385816k used,   687100k free,   113700k buffers
Swap:   538136k total,        0k used,   538136k free,   772692k cached

This tells you that I have 2GB RAM installed, and despite the fact that I've 
not get anything much happening at the moment, a large slice of that is being 
used.  The important bit, though, is that my swap file is not being used at 
all.  If your swap is showing that it is mostly used, that's the time when you 
need to make decisions - usually to add more RAM.

(By the way, hit 'q' to stop top running.)

> How can I find out the culprit processes and make my system leaner? Any
> website to tell me what each processes in memory does to check if I need
> it?
>
You almost certainly don't need to.  Hope that helps

Anne
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