How to free up memory?
 

In Fedora Core 6 I am working on 256MB RAM. I know it is not much and I will shortly increase the RAM size but is there any way that I can free up the RAM and make the PC run faster? In Windows though it is running at a great speed.

When the system is up after a boot it is running perfectly ok and fast, but after say one hour of working (particularly when I am running openoffice) it is getting extremely slow.

Please give me suggestions.

as a first step, run "ps aux" "top" "free -mt" and check /proc/meminfo to get an idea of what applications you are running and exactly how much memory/cpu is being used, and by what. you may be running a lot of unnecessary stuff....

I'm also running FC6 and have noticed at times my laptop slows down. However this is not due to RAM or the lack there of in my case. Sometimes I have noticed background processes start up and take a lot of cpu. This can be identified via the top command.

Also if you use the menu system -> Administration -> system monitor and click on the resources tab it will show you the amount of RAM and swap you are currently using.

Unless Fedora has changes radically recently, it will be running a heap of unnecessary services, which all take up processor and memory.
Should be plenty of threads here on LQ about what (and how) can be stopped.

Thanks for your replies. Now I have a good idea about what is going on. As syg00 said, Fedora seems to be running lot of stuffs that might be taking up memory. As of now it is very difficult for me to know which one is unnecessary. When I am chekcing ps -aux it is a huge lists of processes running.