top confusion

[plasmid]

I am getting strange discrepensies between how much memory top and gtop says I'm using versus what gkrellm says is being used. I have 256 MB of RAM and 256 Mb swap, but both apps agree that the swap isn't being used. top says that I am using 252 MB of my 256 MB Ram, while Gkrellm says that I have 161 Mb of memory free. What gives? Who should I believe? Gtop also says that netscape 6 is using over 100 MB of RAM!!! Can this be right?

thanks

plasmid

[Strike]

252MB is probably what YOU have available, meaning some other stuff is for the kernel and whatnot. GKrellM is correct, not top (well, sorta). To show you what I mean, type free - a bunch of memory info comes up. To see what you REALLY have free do:

free -m | grep s/c | awk '{print $4}'

(basically the second row, second column number)

That is how much memory you have for you to use if you need it. Other memory is in use, but ONLY because it would be a waste to dump the stuff in memory since you might use it later. As soon as you need that space, you get it, it just trashes some stuff that wasn't being used that was sitting in memory waiting for the unlikely occurrence that it would get used.

[plasmid]

Thanks for the clarification http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif

-plasmid