Plasmoids and Power Consumption

[Antonio Augusto (Mancha)]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 12:55, Steven Vollom <stevenvollom at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> On Tuesday 14 April 2009 12:42:05 pm John DeCarlo wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Steven Vollom
>>
<snipp>
>
> The only thing running right now except the 7 plasmoids running statistics, is
> Kontact, and 5.813gb of memory is in use.  I removed 9.   Does that seem
> right?

"right" is really a strong word in this case :)
Look at my comments further bellow.

>>
>> I have installed a plasmoid that shows memory usage, distinguishing between
>> completely unused, used for cache, and used directly.  Even with 4 GB of
>> RAM, it is almost always mostly cache.
>>
>> In other words - you probably have 6+ GB of RAM for normal operations, even
>> with 7+GB being used.
> I am reading up on Memory leaks.  Is that something I should consider?
>
> What is the command that indicates what is using what and how much?
>

Try running "free -m" from the command line. The output will be
something like this:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           249        245          4          0          3         63
-/+ buffers/cache:        178         71
Swap:          511        467         44

What it means is that in "total" I've 249Mb of "Mem" (physical memory
that is) and 511Mb of swap space.
Of these, 245Mb of my memory are being used, and 4 are free. Of these
245 used, 63 are for cache, that is: stuff that will make the system
works faster.
What this means is taht 178Mb (the number after -/+ buffers/cache) is
ACTUALLY being used by programs, the rest of  the memory (71Mb) is
considered free, if any application ever need it.

In my case, a memory upgrade would be good, since, under a normal
load, my swap is 467Mb.

If you need more help with these, please ask.

Cheers.