[CLUE-Tech] Question About Memory

[Collins Richey]

On Tue, 13 Apr 2004 15:57:01 -0600
vbsouthern <vbsouthern at access4less.net> wrote:

> Question About Memory.
> 
> Equipment and OS: Skip down if this stuff is to boring. Computer built
> 
> in 1998. P2 Motherboard. Front end bus speed 100.  Two 128 MB memory 
> chips. Two hard drives: Primary; Western Digital 10G; Secondary
> Quantum 7.5G... OS: Mandrake/Linux 9.1. Partitioned Primary Drive for
> OS with 517 MB swap space and secondary 7.5G /home.
> 
> It seems that I have a lot of wasted memory. The swap space seems to
> be empty most of the time while the physical memory is filled with
> daily usage making the computer slow.
> 
> About 100 MB of physical memory is being allocated for DISK CACHE, or
> in other words it's just sitting there unused. Is there a way to free
> up more memory on the system? Am I even asking the right questions?
> 

Others can give you more exact specs, or you can google for information
about the way the linux kernel handles memory. I'll tell you what I
know:

1) Based on my experience, 256M is a marginal amount of memory for a
normal linux desktop system; 512M is a much better number, particularly
if you use kde, gnome, full mozilla, open office, gimp, and other memory
hogging applications. I have a slower (cpu-wise) machine with 512M, and
I get as good or better performance than this machine with only 256M.

2) The linux kernel leaves a lot of things in cache until something else
needs the memory. Thus, you can expect to see most of your memory marked
used at all times within a few hours after boot. When a new application
needs memory, some of the cached but not recently referenced memory will
be committed to the new requirement.

3) Thus, you do not need to free up any memory, as this is automatic.

HTH,
-- 
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( CR ) Collins Richey
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