Thanks, I'll try the commands (KDE might have a tool somewhere too).

What I meant is something like: is there a rule of thumb how much RAM a program needs, when it is idle / unused / in the background? Shouldn't the need be reduced to a torso of the program (plus data segment perhaps) due to dynamic linking?

Yeah - KDE has ktop which is top and maybe some other stuff I don't recall.

I honestly don't know about your last question - I don't think that idle processes are really significant, so I'd guess you were right.

Maybe.

Wow - I just switched that when I went to change my email address. I figured there was no point in keeping the old sig any longer.

Always liked that - kind of the verbal equivalent of Escher's hands.

Look hard at my "quote".
Look then at my statement and think again.

Take a lesson from the truths of the written word.



P.S.: I meant the statements in the thread though, didn't catch your original meaning. That's one on me.

As for a "rule of thumb" there really isn't one easy number to go by in linux. If you've got 64MB you could easily have a 64MB swap and not really run into a lot of problems if you aren't running things such as KDE/GNOME or one of their apps. For people with little RAM/HD Space who are concerned with performance usually will look for "lighter" apps that don't bog down the system. It's all in personal preference of what you can tolerate as an allowable speed.

I personally run 640MB DDR Ram, no swap, 150GB HD, and I don't see any performance problems. I have an FTP server, P2P server, NeverWinter Nights, Browser, Apache Server, Gkrellm, IM Clients, Gimp, Mplayer/Mencoder all open at various times (the servers are always running) and have never had a problem.

Free/Top might report full usage of your RAM, however that's nothing to be concerned with. Watch the SWAP portion of those applications to determine the need. RAM will always be fully utilized by Linux in the best manner possible, it uses your RAM to speed up applications (just as an OS should).



HTH

Cool

Well, since I've got 640MB (SDRAM) too, but usually use far less applications than you do, I will simply test it with swap=off (? -> man swap for correct syntax ...).

With luck I just recycled 1 GB for better use. Thanks, guys

the only thing i occasionally need swap for is
rebuilding my knoppix cdrom. For some reason
that thing compresses into ram, so i need a gig of
ram for that plus more for whatever apps i'm running.

i had 768 megs of ddr in this thing until last week, i
wanted to test how much fast ddr was in this machine
than sdram. this mb has 2 slots for either kind of ram.
i ran unixbench, and then changed out the 768 megs
of ddr for a gig of sdram. same score. great.

i'm currently using an 80 gig maxtor with an 8 gig cache.
i bought a 180 gig wd 2 weeks ago, but it makes a
a weird pulsing noise when it's writing that i can't stand.
it was also about 8%slower on unixbench, so i'm still
using the 80 gig. the 180 gig is right above 2 120 gig
drives i'm not using either. what a waste. using 1 drive
and the other 3 are backups.

In this case, you should have made smaller partitions, but on both drives. ie. 500 on one, 500 on the other. then if you correctly edit /etc/fstab they will work together - and will increase performace since they are using both HD's at once (esp. if they are on seperate channels).

Well, swap is on my non-system disk -- so as to separate between swap-data and programs / executables / data (and I do that the other way round with WinNT, too). But I am afraid, they are in a Master / Slave configuration. Well, when I've got the time, I'll change that -- CDROM and CDRecorder are on the same channel too -> no copying on the fly.

But I guess, I am not really using swap anymore, since I upgraded from 128 MB to 640 MB.

Anyhow, thanks for your help.

512 = Half a meg. GET OVER IT

Some programs require a swap, no matter how much ram you have. Beats me if any newer programs are like that, though.


512 meg swap never hurt anybody. This is a stupid issue.

Maybe, however I think they meant 512MB, so that's half a gig

As for apps requiring swap, nah. At least none I've ran across (I don't swap).

Cool

Keep up - already done.

Utilizing RAM, swap, and storage space isn't a stupid issue, though, and we were having a civil discussion about that in general at that point.

And, yeah - gig.

I rarely touch my 500MB swap partition...

(I have 192megs of ram)