[CLUE-Tech] Question About Memory

[Timothy Klein]

On Tuesday 13 April 2004 03:57 pm, vbsouthern wrote:
> Question About Memory.

[snip]

> 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?
>

Your disk cache is NOT wasted memory.  In fact, it will be the memory that 
gives you the performance boost.  Memory that was just sitting empty and 
unused, THAT would be wasted memory.

This question comes up all the time.  Google around for some in depth stuff, 
but your Linux machine will keep memory that is not currently being used as a 
disk cache, to buffer information that you want from/to disk.  It greatly 
improves performance.  If you suddenly launch many programs to fill up main 
memory, the disk cache will shrink, as needed.

If your swap space is empty, it is  because your machine does not currently 
need it.  Empty swap space is a good thing.  Swap memory is painfully slow.

If your computer IS slow (which is a valid question, your machine is no longer 
the most current, it may be 'slow' at its fastest), check for some program 
eating up CPU time in the background with top.
 
HTH,

Tim
-- 
== Timothy Klein || teece at silverklein.net   
== Vanity Page: http://tinyurl.com/vkhp    
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== Hello_World.c: 17 Errors, 31 Warnings...