why kubuntu is eating my memory

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi Sara,

On Thursday 12 May 2005 03:41, Sara Vasquez wrote:
> when I run sudo free -m I get the following
>       total      used      free      shared      buffers     cached 
> Mem:    504       496       7        0           16          314
                   ^^^^^                                      ^^^^^  
          actually used + caches                   amount of cached mem 

> -/+ buffers/cache:

Strange enough, these figures are missing here, however, they can be 
derived from the other figures.

> Swap    956         0            956
                     ^^^^ not swap space actually used
> Does that mean that i only have  7 M of memory left I am only runnig
> mozilla and KDE. that can't be and if that is the case is there a way
> to fix it.

It means that your memory is in use, but the biggest part of it (314MB) 
is caches which can easily be freed but are kept in memory to increase 
performance (disk is slow, as long as the memory would be empty 
otherwise, keeping it as cache is a good thing since re-reading it from 
disk would cost far more time than just using the cached data).

So actually you have about 320MB of memory left, but it's mostly used to 
cache data (which is good! Why should your OS not use it, if it's 
there ...). As soon as some application needs more memory it will free 
caches, which does hardly cost any effort / time.

Also the fact that your swap space is not utilized is a sign that your 
amount of memory is high enough and that everything fits in there 
easily.

Cheers,

sebas
-- 
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Do you guys know what you're doing, or are you just hacking?

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