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.
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!
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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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.)