RAM use by Jaunty and Hardy
Steven Susbauer
steven at too1337.com
Wed Jun 17 23:32:01 UTC 2009
Karl Larsen wrote:
> Here is top for both systems:
>
>
>
>
> This top on Jaunty after 24 hours.
>
> top - 16:08:49 up 23:54, 3 users, load average: 0.10, 0.18, 0.14
> Tasks: 127 total, 3 running, 124 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 29.2%us, 5.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 65.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.0%si,
> 0.0%st
> Mem: 1025636k total, 991852k used, 33784k free, 113360k buffers
> Swap: 1959920k total, 460k used, 1959460k free, 497364k cached
>
> Notice that Jaunty is using 460K of swap which does slow it
> down. It appears that Jaunty needs a minimum of 2 GB of RAM.
>
> PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
>
> 5998 karl 20 0 243m 118m 26m R 21.6 11.9 44:56.74 firefox
>
> 2794 root 20 0 101m 46m 9984 S 7.3 4.6 15:12.50 Xorg
>
> 3538 karl 20 0 367m 53m 19m S 4.7 5.3 6:02.79
> thunderbird-bin
> 3599 karl 20 0 16644 2592 1404 S 0.7 0.3 0:28.55
> gnome-screensav
> 3498 karl 20 0 37864 15m 8892 S 0.3 1.6 6:14.83 gnome-panel
>
> 11887 karl 20 0 2448 1184 912 R 0.3 0.1 0:00.27 top
>
> 1 root 20 0 3084 1584 260 S 0.0 0.2 0:01.30 init
>
> 2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
>
> 3 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
>
> 4 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:04.35 ksoftirqd/0
>
> 5 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0
>
> 6 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.14 events/0
>
> 7 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
>
> 8 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kstop/0
>
> 9 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00
> kintegrityd/0
> 10 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.14 kblockd/0
>
> 11 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
>
> This is Hardy after just a few minutes with firefox also running:
>
>
> top - 10:55:05 up 4 min, 2 users, load average: 0.90, 1.02, 0.47
> Tasks: 125 total, 3 running, 122 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 13.6%us, 3.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 81.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.3%hi, 1.3%si,
> 0.0%st
> Mem: 1034328k total, 710052k used, 324276k free, 23948k buffers
> Swap: 1959920k total, 0k used, 1959920k free, 374040k cached
>
> As you can see Hardy uses 0K of Swap: So it can work with just
> 1GB of RAM.
>
>
>
>
>
> PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
>
> 6045 root 20 0 74276 32m 8668 S 5.3 3.2 0:06.62 Xorg
>
> 6682 karl 20 0 194m 60m 22m R 4.7 6.0 0:06.73 firefox
>
> 6318 karl 20 0 38968 22m 13m S 0.7 2.2 0:02.66 gnome-panel
>
> 6319 karl 20 0 15200 2680 1784 S 0.7 0.3 0:00.32
> gnome-screensav
> 6387 karl 20 0 59192 29m 9344 S 0.7 3.0 0:07.08 compiz.real
>
> 6499 karl 20 0 18248 9636 6828 S 0.7 0.9 0:00.62
> gtk-window-deco
> 6622 karl 20 0 31244 17m 10m S 0.7 1.7 0:00.76 gedit
>
> 6644 karl 20 0 74644 20m 10m R 0.7 2.0 0:00.58
> gnome-terminal
> 6669 karl 20 0 2308 1120 852 R 0.7 0.1 0:00.16 top
>
> 6291 karl 20 0 39972 9m 7884 S 0.3 1.0 0:00.67
> gnome-settings-
> 6320 karl 20 0 72788 33m 13m S 0.3 3.3 0:05.45 nautilus
>
> 1 root 20 0 2844 1688 544 S 0.0 0.2 0:01.34 init
>
> 2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
>
> 3 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
>
> 4 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
>
> 5 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0
>
> 6 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 events/0
>
> 73 Karl
>
It is normal for some things to be put in swap after a long amount of
time if they are not being used (swappiness is set to 60 by default),
you don't want an idle app using a ton of your ram when it is not doing
anything. I suggest you do a more equal comparison, rather than taking a
system that has been up for a longer time vs a freshly booted system.
Also, read about the swappiness setting, as it will influence how the
kernel uses swap: http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000 is a start - If you
don't want swap being used so much, you should lower the swappiness number.
In both cases you still have free system memory, and you also have some
memory being used for buffers. This seems to show that your system is
not using swap due to running out of ram as you are assuming. I
guarantee you would notice this if it were the case, both in the
response of the system and the grinding of the hard drive.
My system which runs some larger apps for long periods of inactivity
(Firefox, Thunderbird, Banshee for days on end) has swap in use after 5
days, but plenty of free ram. They are a little delayed in spinning up
again when I return to using them, but then purr along fine as they are
put back into ram.
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