added memory ...

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 21:59, Kent Emia wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-07-22 at 10:22, Craig White wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 19:18, Kent Emia wrote:
> > > hello to all,
> > > 
> > > is it safe just to add up another slot of memory without any changes?
> > > 
> > > and just wondered before adding up the 256mb of memory i have ranging
> > > 4000k - 5000k free of memory and as i added another 256mb a total of
> > > 512mb of memory in my PC .. still the free memory is still ranging from
> > > the one i specified above ..
> > > 
> > > so does this means that its useless for me adding up the memory because
> > > i still do have the same free memory ..
> > ----
> > It's not useless at all.
> 
> forgive me but im not a real techie guy
> 
> > The free memory didn't change because you didn't change the amount of
> > virtual memory (man swapon) 
> 
> swapon ?? is it off by default? do i have to do this "swapon" ??
> 
> > but because you have added more real memory,
> > it's likely that you will do a lot less paging in and out of virtual
> > memory. Of course, you can add more virtual memory - see the man pages
> > referenced above.
> 
> running atop
> 
> MEM |  tot 497.1M | free   11.3M | cache 221.8M | buff   19.4M |
> SWP | tot  511.9M | free  511.9M |              | swin       0 | 
> 
> i've noticed my swap wasn't even bothered .. but my memory is being much
> consumed even though only few apps are running that is my real concern 
> 
> but if these is TOTALLY normal, maybe i am just expecting my free memory
> will be will 256M or less..
----
which part of 'man swapon' do you not understand?

I suppose it's much easier to ask here than to google an explanation of
memory management. 

Quick thumbnail to disguise that I really don't know what I'm talking
about.

Virtual memory establishes itself upon bootup. All requests for system
memory go to virtual memory manager. Adding physical RAM doesn't change
virtual memory parameters one they are set during configuration of SWAP
partition. More SWAP (virtual memory) can be obtained or amount can be
reduced with use of swapon command (hence the 'man swapon'). Programs
such as top which give you analysis of free memory are displaying
results of memory which is managed by the virtual memory process - which
claims all of your physically installed RAM and creates pages of memory
on your SWAP disk and pages the memory contents to and from the swap
disk as needed. More physical memory would theoretically reduce paging
(slower hard disk memory operations).

Craig