Further memory question [was: Clear the computer's memory?]

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 30 March 2006 18:01, R Kimber wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 16:46:19 +0200

> Are you saying that it takes maybe 24 hours for the kernel to work
> out which memory it can use for buffers and whatever?  I assumed
> that it would do this straight away and just dynamically release
> memory as I start up apps.
>
> After boot up and my starting a few small apps, Gkrellm says circa
> 1720MB free.  So I take it that the kernel isn't, then, using that
> memory for buffers, but that it grabs about 1GB of it for buffers
> etc after about 24 hours ???  That sounds a bit odd.   If after 24
> hours 700MB is 'free' why doesn't the kernel use that bit for
> buffers too? There is always about 700MB 'free'. What make it
> ignore that part of memory, which presumably I am not using? Or is
> the kernel limited as to how much memory it can dynamically manage?

Memory allocation is hard, Linux's memory allocation is even 
harder :-)

Like another poster said, it's really tricky figuring out exactly what 
is going on, *especially* as the kernel dynamically adapts to 
changes. To truly understand it all, you'd have to read the code, and 
good luck with that.

All I can add at this point is that your machine is constantly busy 
doing stuff - cron jobs, updatedb, etc, etc. Also your "extra" memory 
usage seems to rise to a maximum of 1G. Considering that the x86 has 
some kid of arbitrary hurdle to jump at the 1G point, I'd say that 
bears further investigation. Not much help I know, but it's all I 
got.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five