Subject: Re: Kernel Memory Management
From: Robert Vogt IV (vogt@arborhost.com)
Date: Thu Jul 05 2001 - 09:02:38 MDT
Chris,
> I have Linux installed on a 256 MB Machine. Initially, when it starts up,
> it uses about 40 MB of RAM, no swap space. Soon after startup, it uses up
> all available memory, mainly as 'Shared", "Buff" or "Cached" memory
> (according to 'top'). It also uses a little bit of swap space, in the
> region of 8 MB or so.
> Now, I increased the systems memory to 768 MB but the behavior is still the
> same, except that the chunks of shared, buff and cached are getting bigger.
> It doesn't really bother me, the swapped out stuff is probably stuff the
> system never uses anyway (such as the NFS stuff, which I do start up but
> never use [I should really go and clean out my rc.d directory, I know]). I
> would just like to know how the system allocated the memory, based on what
> does it decide what has to go into cache or a buffer ...
The concept of Linux is that, unlike WINDOZE or the MacOS, it uses all
available memory (there's no point having it if you don't use it...). Linux
essentially buffers/caches everything it can, to speed things up, and
releases the memory when you need it. I wouldn't worry until you get errors
from daemons that they can't allocate memory, etc... :)
Sincerely,
Robert Vogt IV
ArborHost
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Thu Jul 05 2001 - 08:14:10 MDT