Clear the computer's memory?

[Tony Arnold]

Vince,

Vincent Trouilliez wrote:

> Ah, that's different then. Sometimes I have a similar problem: I have
> 768MB of RAM, and most of the time, it uses only 150 or 200MB for normal
> desktop use (web/mail/music/video playbac). But when I start a big app
> like VMware, it eats all the memory. When I close VMware, all my other
> apps were put to swap, so everything is super slow. I also have the same
> problem when I resume the machine from suspend to disk (EVEN when the
> swap was clear when putting it to sleep!)

Isn't that inevitable? Suspend to disk means just that: move all the
prcesses out to the disk so the machine can be powered off. Linux then
uses its normal paging mechanism to get stuff back into memory as it is
needed.

> The solution I found was to disable the swap, so that it forces Linux to
> reload everything into RAM at once. This takes only a few seconds max,
> depending how much is on swap and how fast your drives are, and
> instantly, the desktop is as responsive as it was before I started
> VMware (or whatever big program). Then of course, re-activate the swap.

Does the machine not become more an more responsive without deactivating
swap? I'm thinking the processes that get used will be swapped back into
memory anyway over time? The ones that don't get used will just stay in
swap, but shouldn't slow things down.

Just my two centimes worth:-)

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold