What is hammering my memory?

[Dotan Cohen]

On 2 July 2010 17:11, Chan Chung Hang Christopher
<christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:
> The Linux kernel. It's normal. Most of your chewed up memory is taken up
> by the page cache. Nothing to worry about. The kernel will automatically
> free up memory as needed. The page cache attempts to save you from
> having to operate at hard disk speed (milliseconds) as opposed to RAM
> speed (microseconds) so if you want a culprit, it is the kernel. If you
> are really not happy about it using memory, set swappiness to zero.
>

I'll ask a different question, then. What could be causing the system
to be so sluggish? I see nothing in top that looks to be a hog.

top - 16:57:03 up  1:50,  2 users,  load average: 0.72, 0.70, 0.54
Tasks: 179 total,   1 running, 176 sleeping,   0 stopped,   2 zombie
Cpu(s):  2.1%us,  1.9%sy,  0.0%ni, 95.9%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   2059656k total,  1972528k used,    87128k free,      220k buffers
Swap:  2931856k total,      328k used,  2931528k free,  1258032k cached

 PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 894 root      20   0  154m  43m 3432 S    3  2.2   8:59.43 Xorg
14627 merkat1   20   0  125m  25m  15m S    2  1.3   1:53.45 kpackagekitsmar
26773 merkat1   20   0 85464  18m  11m S    2  0.9   0:00.81 plugin-containe
26718 merkat1   20   0  122m  20m  15m S    1  1.0   0:01.03 konsole
 5118 merkat1   20   0  243m  34m  22m S    1  1.7   7:52.16 kwin
26747 merkat1   20   0  253m  80m  26m S    1  4.0   0:10.06 firefox-bin
 1469 root      20   0  3708 1052  896 S    0  0.1   0:03.69 hald-addon-inpu
 1624 merkat1   20   0  297m  67m  29m S    0  3.3   1:59.53 plasma-desktop
 1696 merkat1   20   0  2400 1040  728 S    0  0.1   0:07.65 ksysguardd
26737 merkat1   20   0  2620 1132  836 R    0  0.1   0:00.45 top
   1 root      20   0  2872 1572 1192 S    0  0.1   0:00.58 init
   2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
   3 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.34 ksoftirqd/0
   4 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.02 migration/0
   5 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://gibberish.co.il
http://what-is-what.com