Where's all my memory going?

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1

I’m a fairly new openSUSE and linux user, first time posting to these
forums, so I apologize in advance if this is the wrong forum, but here
goes.

I have noticed my machine is not quite as zippy as I was hoping and
noticed strange (to me) patterns in my memory usage. Here’s the output
from top:

john@linux-yq5y:~> top
top - 22:56:25 up 1 day, 15:23, 1 user, load average: 0.63, 0.44,
0.34
Tasks: 111 total, 3 running, 108 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 5.0%us, 2.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 92.6%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si,
0.0%st
Mem: 449624k total, 286388k used, 163236k free, 8912k
buffers
Swap: 2096472k total, 222504k used, 1873968k free, 92780k
cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
20475 john 20 0 76540 19m 13m R 2.7 4.4 0:29.40 konsole
2108 root 20 0 271m 48m 1832 R 2.3 11.1 67:37.86 Xorg
2932 john 20 0 85096 23m 2692 S 1.7 5.2 27:39.11
knetworkmanager
2886 john 20 0 160m 9.9m 4116 S 1.0 2.3 28:58.37 knotify4
1648 messageb 20 0 2696 896 528 S 0.3 0.2 5:38.38
dbus-daemon
2810 john 20 0 74768 4708 2372 S 0.3 1.0 2:21.31 kded4
1 root 20 0 772 64 40 S 0.0 0.0 0:02.74 init
2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
3 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00
migration/0
4 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.00
ksoftirqd/0
5 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:09.54 events/0
6 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
7 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:02.42 kblockd/0
8 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:16.72 kacpid
9 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.40
kacpi_notify
10 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 cqueue
11 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
12 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:23.70
kondemand/0
15 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:14.98 kswapd0
16 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00
aio/0

If you add up all the memory use, it comes out to 24.2%. As you can
see, my total memory is 449624k. 449624k * 24.2% = 108809k. So why is
my memory listed as 286388k used?

Also, I realize (after previewing my post) that the top output is
pretty tough to read - all the spaces seem to get stripped out by the
forum software. If it’s hard to read and you can suggest a way to make
it more readable, I can repost it.

–
suburbancow

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2

Most of the time you should see very little free memory as mostly it is
cached

–
Box: Linux 2.6.25.18-0.2 x86_64 | OS 11.0 | (KDE4.1.86) “5.1” | M2N4-SLI
| AMD 64 X2 5200+ | nVidia 8500GT | 2GB RAM
http://tinyurl.com/985fp2

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3

Oh, I’m running openSUSE 11.0, KDE 4.0.4, pretty much an out-of-the-box
install.

–
suburbancow

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4

Pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean by it being cached?

–
suburbancow

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5

I think used includes memory set aside as buffer memory. You can also
use -ksysguard- to monitor activity which is a lot easier to read with
its pretty graphs!

–
nzlbob23

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6

suburbancow;1918892 Wrote:
> Oh, I’m running openSUSE 11.0, KDE 4.0.4, pretty much an out-of-the-box
> install.

Ick:sick:

Either upgrade that kde4 or use kde3

Stable kde4 upgrade you need to add these repos

‘Index of /repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/STABLE:/Desktop/openSUSE_11.0’
(http://tinyurl.com/3ttxs3)

‘Index of /repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/STABLE:/Extra-Apps/openSUSE_11.0’
(http://tinyurl.com/6ysprc)

‘Index of
/repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/Community/openSUSE_11.0_KDE4_STABLE_Desktop’
(http://tinyurl.com/58c7on)

You can install kde3 from Yast -Software Management - Patterns

add
kde3base
kde3desktop

disable auto login and you can choose to use kde3 or kde4 at the login
screen

–
Box: Linux 2.6.25.18-0.2 x86_64 | OS 11.0 | (KDE4.1.86) “5.1” | M2N4-SLI
| AMD 64 X2 5200+ | nVidia 8500GT | 2GB RAM
http://tinyurl.com/985fp2

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7

suburbancow;1918887 Wrote:
> Also, I realize (after previewing my post) that the top output is pretty
> tough to read - all the spaces seem to get stripped out by the forum
> software. If it’s hard to read and you can suggest a way to make it
> more readable, I can repost it.
Hope that helps

–
If I helped you, help me. Please vote to fix the VNC bug that’s driving
me crazy.
‘Vote here at bottom left of the web page’
(https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=457809)

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8

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

For example:

<quote>
ab@ablaptop:~> free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 4043336 2529728 1513608 0 208 1408152

  • -/+ buffers/cache:1121368 2921968
    Swap: 1052216 0 1052216
    </quote>

As you can see from my box I have 1.5 GB free space in RAM… but I
don’t have a whole lot open (a dozen or so user-space apps besides
whatever the system and Gnome load on their own)… so, where has all my
space gone? In the last category you can see I have 1.4 GB cached data,
which means data that are on the filesystem but which is beind held in
excess RAM to speed things up. This is a very good thing since it means
an instance performance boost any time my system needs a file that is
already in cache (libraries, documents, executables, etc.) since there
is no need to go all the way to the super-slow (relatively speaking)
hard drive to fetch the data. Cache is also instantly dumped if an
application needs it for something that can’t be done outside RAM so
there really aren’t any downsides.

Good luck.

suburbancow wrote:
> Pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean by it being cached?
>
>
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9

Thanks for your quick responses, caf4926, nzlbob23, and ab@novell.com.
And swerdna, thanks for the formatting help.

caf, I’m installing KDE3 as we speak. This has been a good learning
experience, now I’ll see what kind of trouble I can get into playing
around with different window managers.

There’s no reason I can’t install, say, KDE3, 4, and, say Xfce and try
them all out, right? (Other than obvious disk space limitations.)

–
suburbancow

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10

suburbancow;1919198 Wrote:
> Thanks for your quick responses, caf4926, nzlbob23, and ab@novell.com.
> And swerdna, thanks for the formatting help.
>
> caf, I’m installing KDE3 as we speak. This has been a good learning
> experience, now I’ll see what kind of trouble I can get into playing
> around with different window managers.
>
> There’s no reason I can’t install, say, KDE3, 4, and, say Xfce and
> try them all out, right? (Other than obvious disk space limitations.)

Quite correct to the above.

–
Box: Linux 2.6.25.18-0.2 x86_64 | OS 11.0 | (KDE4.1.86) “5.1” | M2N4-SLI
| AMD 64 X2 5200+ | nVidia 8500GT | 2GB RAM
http://tinyurl.com/985fp2

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