Hi folks! I am 90% linux noob, using a new install of openSuse 11.0. I am very happy indeed, by FAR the best of all the distro’s I have tried to use. I am still at the “What does that do? click it and see what happens” stage. So I came across something called “System Load” and clicked it. It revealed that the system is using ALL of my 2Gb physical memory, and NONE of the 2Gb swap file. Is this right? I have a number of apps running but nothing intensive or memory hogging ie I have Konsole, Mplayer (playing mp3’s), Konqueror (x2), Kwrite (x3), Real player (idle), and Firefox, (3 windows, about 10 tabs open in each) and Thunderbird (2 windows)
Well I could be wrong about this, but I think it is set as default to use your physical memory first before it uses the swap file. Mainly because the physical memory has a much faster access time than a HDD. This is also a good thing considering it helps the applications run faster on your pc. I don’t think it is actually a problem and if you haven’t noticed any performance issues, you shouldn’t be worried. If need be though you can manually force the computer to use the swap more often by adding this line to /etc/sysctl.conf:
vm.swappiness = 100
You can change the number to a higher or lower number depending on how high of a priority you want for your swap. You can also run:
sudo cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
in a console and it will tell you what your current setting is at. I think 60 is the default but could be different on your system.
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Exactly. Also use the ‘free’ command. Notice that your section for
‘cached’ may be significant as well, and this is just the Linux system
caching stuff from the filesystem that you MAY need, but is also memory
that can be freed in an instant if needed, so to get your real system
usage take USED and subtract CACHED and that’s how much your
applications need right now.
Good luck.
JeremiahMosser wrote:
> Well I could be wrong about this, but I think it is set as default to
> use your physical memory first before it uses the swap file. Mainly
> because the physical memory has a much faster access time than a HDD.
> This is also a good thing considering it helps the applications run
> faster on your pc. I don’t think it is actually a problem and if you
> haven’t noticed any performance issues, you shouldn’t be worried. If
> need be though you can manually force the computer to use the swap more
> often by adding this line to /etc/sysctl.conf:
>
> Code:
> --------------------
> vm.swappiness = 100
> --------------------
>
> You can change the number to a higher or lower number depending on how
> high of a priority you want for your swap. You can also run:
>
> Code:
> --------------------
> sudo cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
> --------------------
>
> in a console and it will tell you what your current setting is at. I
> think 60 is the default but could be different on your system.
>
>
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wakou adjusted his/her tinfoil beanie to write:
>
> Hi folks! I am 90% linux noob, using a new install of openSuse 11.0. I
> am very happy indeed, by FAR the best of all the distro’s I have
> tried to use. I am still at the “What does that do? click it and see
> what happens” stage. So I came across something called “System Load”
> and clicked it. It revealed that the system is using ALL of my 2Gb
> physical memory, and NONE of the 2Gb swap file. Is this right? I have
> a number of apps running but nothing intensive or memory hogging ie I
> have Konsole, Mplayer (playing mp3’s), Konqueror (x2), Kwrite (x3),
> Real player (idle), and Firefox, (3 windows, about 10 tabs open in
> each) and Thunderbird (2 windows)
>
>
Ditto to what everyone else says, just remember that unused memory is
wasted memory.
The performance gain in having loads of cached data far outweighs any
slight/minute delay of flushing some spare if needed
HTH
–
Mark
Nil illegitimi carborundum
Lolz at “swappiness”
Thanks guys…
Next question, also looking at some of the system monitors, I find my Linux install sda6 partition is almost full,19.6gb /20gb despite having accepted the defaults when installing. Do I have to repartition? It seems silly that the installer would offer a partition schema which is not big enough?
Disk Information
Device
Filesystem
Total Available Used
84G Media ext3 77.5 GB 69.0 GB 8.6 GB (HOME)
21G Media ext3 19.7 GB 1.6 GB 18.1 GB
wakou adjusted his/her tinfoil beanie to write:
>
> Lolz at “swappiness”
>
> Thanks guys…
> Next question, also looking at some of the system monitors, I find my
> Linux install sda6 partition is almost full,19.6gb /20gb despite
> having accepted the defaults when installing. Do I have to
> repartition? It seems silly that the installer would offer a partition
> schema which is not big enough?
>
> Disk Information
> Device
> Filesystem
> Total Available Used
> 84G Media ext3 77.5 GB 69.0 GB 8.6 GB (HOME)
> 21G Media ext3 19.7 GB 1.6 GB 18.1 GB
>
>
Have you checked further at where the majority of those files are?
If they are in your /tmp dir then you can set the persistence of these
in Yast>System>/etc/sysconfig editor>System>Cron>
Here you can set the max days in tmp and if you want the tmp dir emptied
on boot.
Also you can use logrotate to compress the log files in /var/log/ these
can eat up quite a bit if not kept under control.
If neither dirs are the problem then you might have to un-install some
apps or if you have a spare blank partition around on your drive or even
an extra drive then it is possible and easy to just move stuff about,
you can move completely dirs like /opt, /usr, /var, /tmp and others over
and mount them instead during boot and delete the originals. If this is
what you want then post back and will give instructions if I am still
here or one of the other guys will help you,
HTH
–
Mark
Nil illegitimi carborundum
Hi
Seems like a lot of disk space used… what is the output from the
commands;
df -k
sudo du -sh /*
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 11.1 x86 Kernel 2.6.27.7-9-default
up 1 day 21:02, 2 users, load average: 0.16, 0.23, 0.28
GPU GeForce 6600 TE/6200 TE - Driver Version: 180.29
Thanks folks… Patience is a virtue, but unfortunately
after making a partition bigger can’t boot anymore - openSUSE Forums
D’OH!!!
>:(>:(>:(>:(>
Sorry about the masive fonting here guys, was not intentional!