Hi.

I'm running Sarge (dist-upgraded to testing) and KDE 3.3. Even though I have 1 GB of RAM, none is free even when running nothing but Mozilla Firefox.

I've got just a basic installation of Debian, with basically just the default apps running in the background. XFree86 and firefox-bin consumes over 250 MB alone.

I this normal? I thought 1 GB of RAM would be more than enough to run kde and a web browser.

Kenneho,
once I had the same doubt. I read somewhere that in kernels 2.6.x (not sure about the version) the system occupies a lot of memory because for the sake of performance.

According to the article, most of the RAM is devoted do disk caching.

In fact, although my memory is almost full I have not noticed overall performance degradation, so I assume that it's not a Debian or KDE specific issue.

I was pretty happy with the fact that the memory was fully occupied with low priority/resource consuming processes.

Hope the info was helpfull/correct.

As long as your swap run cool, no worries

Yeah this is how unix memory management works. Unix's memory management poses the question of if there is free memory, why not use it? So what it does is cache recently used/launched programs in cache and if a program is launch and there isn't free memory, stuff in the cache starts dropping out!

Thanks for the replies.

Now that it got mentioned, I can't say that the system performance seems degraded. There's no sign of swapping, so I guess it's just the disk cache that consumes free RAM. Actually quite smart, coming to think about it!

Linux is great, as you see.....