RAM use by Jaunty and Hardy
Karl F. Larsen
klarsen1 at gmail.com
Wed Jun 17 17:38:04 UTC 2009
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Steven Susbauer wrote:
> 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.
>
>
Sorry Top reports how much RAM and SWAP is used period! Jaunty uses
much more RAM than Hardy, period!
73 karl
- --
Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
Linux User
#450462 http://counter.li.org.
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