Memory Management

[nmeyers at javalinux.net]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 03:36:48PM -0500, Duane Morin wrote:
> Ok, I turn on my machine.  It immediately reports that 85% of my memory 
> (1.2 gig) is in use.  What are the best tools for determining what's using 
> all that memory?  I'm not running anything meaningful!

I don't know what tools can help you, but Linux tends to cache filesystem
info in spare space. Very helpful for performance if you're repeatedly
hammering some part of your file system.

Nathan

> 
> here's some "top":
> 
>  14:58:56  up 12 min,  3 users,  load average: 0.03, 0.20, 0.20
> 68 processes: 66 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
> CPU states:  cpu    user    nice  system    irq  softirq  iowait    idle
>            total    0.6%    0.0%    0.2%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%   99.2%
> Mem:  1292024k av, 1073548k used,  218476k free,       0k shrd,   22844k 
> buff
>         87992k active,             931516k inactive
> Swap: 1831368k av,       0k used, 1831368k free                  909496k 
> cached
>                                                                                 
>   PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
>  2138 duane      9   0 24212  23M  1992 S     0.0  1.8   0:00   0 gconfd-2
>  2069 root      16   0 53132  20M  6924 S     0.6  1.6   0:07   0 X
>  2187 duane      9   0 17352  16M  9976 S     0.0  1.3   0:00   0 nautilus
>  2197 duane      9   0 17352  16M  9976 S     0.0  1.3   0:00   0 nautilus
>  2198 duane      9   0 17352  16M  9976 S     0.0  1.3   0:00   0 nautilus
>  2199 duane      9   0 17352  16M  9976 S     0.0  1.3   0:00   0 nautilus
>  2195 duane     15  10 15760  15M  9508 S N   0.0  1.2   0:00   0 
> rhn-applet-gu
> 
> Whats with the 909496k cached?  What is that? 
> 
> Duane
> 
> 
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