64 bit info

[Karl F. Larsen]

J wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:20, Karl F. Larsen <klarsen1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> top - 08:14:07 up 12:28,  3 users,  load average: 0.43, 0.18, 0.11
>> Tasks: 145 total,   1 running, 144 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0
>> zombie
>> Cpu(s):  6.0%us,  3.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 90.7%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,
>>  0.0%si,  0.0%st
>> Mem:   1796700k total,  1451832k used,   344868k free,
>> 139252k buffers
>> Swap:  1959920k total,        0k used,  1959920k free,
>> 757764k cached
>>
>> Notice I have 2 GB of RAM and the 64bit 9.10 is using just
>> 1.45 GB of the RAM. I wasted $92 on new fast RAM which I was
>> assured you need.
>>
>>        From these measurements it is clear that 64 bit runs fine
>> with just 2 GB of RAM. The people claiming you need 4GB are wrong.
> 
> Yes, anyone saying you "need" 4GB+ to run a 64bit OS are wrong.  I
> happily run them all day long on 1GB or more.  HOWEVER, the reality is
> that you don't get any real benefit from 64bit addressing until you
> are running 4GB or more RAM.
> 
> OTOH, statistics from top on a system that is idle are useless.
> Especially WRT memory usage.  Linux does not utilize memory like
> Windows does, and any linux system, after running for a while, should
> show > 75% memory usage just by the nature of how Linux uses RAM.
> Your 1.5GB are't all being used, a good bit of that is simply cached
> pages.  That's part of how Linux gets its speed.  It caches everything
> it can in RAM, clearing out the cached data in favor of fresh data
> when needed.  It's completely possible to have a system doing
> absolutely nothing show 99% memory usage.
> 
> 
	Yes and my computer was doing little since top was a major 
CPU user...but I was surprised to see it was happy with the 
old 2 GB RAM.

	I will be getting 4 GB more RAM in a few days. It is 2 sticks 
of 2GB each. So I will experiment with this 9.10 64bit and see 
if I can determine what improves.


73 Karl



-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
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