Memory Leak?

[MrMoray]

Hey gang, I've got 256meg of memory, running Drake 8.0. When I run Top, it says I'm using all but 5-10meg of the memory but all I've got running are Gnome & terminal. Any Thoughts?

[MandK_10]

I am sure that someone will chime in and give more details, but when I first started with linux I had this same issue come up. When I brought it up I was told that this had something to do with the way linux handles memory. You actually have memory available. It is apparently not a bad thing.

Just my $.02

Mike

[Derango]

If I had a dollar every time I saw this question.

Linux stores the most recently used files in your system RAM. Basicly, if you open a text file, make some changes and then save it, the changes are not saved directly to the hard drive. Instead, they are saved into system RAM. The way linux sees it, if you used a file recently, you might want to use it again soon.

As you may or may not know, your system memory is much faster than your hard drive. So you can load somthing faster from it. For example, try opening a memory intensive program like mozilla or netscape after rebooting. Note how much time it takes and then close it. Start it up again and notice how much quicker it starts this time.

But don't worry about running out of memory. When a program actualy needs the memory taken up by the cache, it dumps the contents of the cache to the hard drive and frees up room for the other program.

[bdl]

It might also be mentioned that Mandrake is likely to be a resource hog, especially if you're running X with Gnome, KDE, one of the 'heavier' window managers. This is going to happen, and eventually pages will be swapped out to and from disk, so it pays to have alot of memory and a nice 500mb or so swap partition, preferably on a seperate hdd on a seperate controller.

Some solutions:

Run Slackware, Debian, *BSD. These tend to be lighter in weight and for the most part, IMHO, handle memory better, especially BSD.

As mentioned above, get more memory or have a nice sized swap partition on a seperate controller, I've experienced a noticable performance increase over having it on the same drive/slave drive.

Run as few things on the system as possible. For example, if you mainly want to use it as a 'fun workstation', playing games, surfing the net and installing cool stuff to tinker with, shut off as many services as possible so they're not taking up resources. This is also a good idea just for securities sake.

Switch to Blackbox or FVWM window managers rather than Gnome or KDE. They are much lighter and I happen to prefer them anyway.

All in all, 256MB should be fine, but then again, memory is dirt cheap right now. Why not grab another 256??

One last thing. The command 'top' is nice, but it in itself uses up resources and really is only meant to monitor the system when you are experiencing some unexplained load or want to test something out. Rather than that, use the 'free' command like so:

prompt# free -mo

This should give you an idea of how much memory is being utilized and will exit immediately to free itself from memory as well.

Just some ideas - have fun!

[ 17 August 2001: Message edited by: bdl ]

[Tyr-7BE]

It's a happy little caching system. It got me at first too :)

[bdg1983]

If you run 'free' you will see the stats for buffers and cached. Whenever the memory is needed for applications, the cache is reduced in size. Just a better way of utilizing memory that is not being used for anything else.

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 513608 210516 303092 0 11412 116164
-/+ buffers/cache: 82940 430668
Swap: 136512 0 136512

[MrMoray]

Thanks Gang!