Ram Question

[Tom Mitchell]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 03:26:28PM -0500, Jeremy Kruer wrote:
> 
>    I installed Fedora Core on my PC at home and it is using almost all of
>    the  Ram  that  my  PC has (using about 240mb of 256mb).
....
>    Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can free up some RAM?

You need to be clear what all the memory is being used for.

Most Unix/Linux OS flavors use all the system memory for temporary
file system cache.  This is good and expected.

When memory is needed for other things a chunk of cache is allocated
to the new process.  The memory is recycled when referenced/ touched
by the new process.

The program "top" will give you a summary. You can sort by memory foot
print.  A full process listing "ps -elf" will let you see more
details. Inspect the SZ and RSS columns.  Look at these and do some
arithmetic.  Since processes can share pages of memory simple
arithmetic can result in totals that are larger than reality as the
same page is accounted for multiple times.  This also is normal.


-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	mitch48-at-sbcglobal-dot-net