fedora core 2 memeory full

karan101 · 09-18-2004, 03:18 PM

Hello people
yeah, im kinna new to linux and i have fedora core 2 linux installed on my laptop( AMD 2800 Athlon xp-m 2.2Ghz, 512 ram, 512 cache, 64 mb shared nvidia, compaq HP Presario 2100 60 GB HD but Dual boot with winXP HE ) i had the full instalation of fedora but disabled some services such as http, mysql .... but still on Memory - info center it shows that only about 15 to sometimes 25 MB of free ram is available...would you people help me out here to see what is using my memory and slowin my laptop down please
thank u very much
karan

hw-tph · 09-19-2004, 06:27 AM

This is a common misconception among long time Windows users. Linux will cache as much as possible in RAM - both data and code - to speed up operations, and the in-RAM buffers and cache will generally show up as used in most programs.

Type free -m. This is the output from that command on my laptop:

Code:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           502        222        279          0         12        117
-/+ buffers/cache:         92        409
Swap:          972          0        972

It says used 222M and free 279M. That doesn't really tell us that much. The interesting line is the -/+ buffers/cache line which states free 92 and free 409. This line reports the amount of memory in active use and how much is available. As you can see, no swap is being used. When your system memory really is being used intensively you will see swap usage increase, and that's a good measurement of how "full" your RAM really is.

Håkan

karan101 · 09-23-2004, 08:26 PM

thanks for clearing that up ....

cctjon · 10-12-2004, 09:15 PM

My question in this situation is: can I limit how much memory is used in this fashion? Do I want to? My perception is as soon as the cache = memory size, things appear slower.

Thoughts?