Memory Problems (Hoary)

[ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY]

On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 09:46 +0100, James Cummings wrote:
> Hi There,
> 
> When I leave work my ubuntu 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog installation seems to
> have plenty of memory free (when I do free -m it says it has about 383
> meg (not including swap) free of its 1gb.  However, when I come back
> in the morning it only has about 15 meg free.  When I use top to look
> at the memory requirements of the running processes, nothing stands
> out as unusual.  Xorg is using the most, and some gnome-applets are
> also taking up a fair bit, but nothing drastic or enough to explain
> the difference.
> 
> 
> Any suggestions on:
> a) A way to claw back this memory without just rebooting? or
> b) A way to solve the underlying problem?
> 
> -James
> 
> --
> James Cummings, Cummings dot James at GMail dot com
Your system probably consume about 200MiB of memory only!  The rest of
the 1GiB is used for buffering/caching.  To make sure, here's the output
of "free -m" on my system:
        zamb ~ $ free -m
                     total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
        Mem:          1012        989         22          0        167        450
        -/+ buffers/cache:        370        641
        Swap:          956         29        927

>From above, you see the 22MiB?  This is what's *not* used by the system,
applications, buffers and cache.  My "real" free memory that can be used
by the system and applications *without* resolving to the swap is
641MiB.

I'm pretty sure your's have the same thing (with different numbers of
course!).

Why it changed when left the system after work?  Because there are
certain daemon/services (for checking the system; rotating and
compressing the system logs; and updating the "locate" database) that
works in the background at about 6AM everyday that cause the system to
cache/buffer heavily to speed things up.

I hope this answers your queries.
Ziyad.