I have been noticing that my memory usage will suddenly jump to 480 - 503 mb used out of 512 and stay used. This is on Fedora Core 1 and the I only have one instance of Firefox and Gaim open. Now Gaim takes a fairly decent chunk of memory, but the one that gets me is the HTTPD process. It constantly shows around 8-10 instances of the httpd process running using 9.2 mb per process.

Now I do have Apache installed from the Fedora install discs and have setup to automatically start at run level 5. but I don't want it running 8-9 instances of the darned thing.

Also, there is a process called mingetty that has about 5 instances of itself. What's that for?

Any solutions. Thanks

mingetty is short for minimal getty. It provides the consoles (hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to F6 to cycle through them, Ctrl+Alt+F7 to get back to your graphical X session) and uses about 8KB of kernelspace memory for each instance.

As for httpd, or Apache, the default is starting multiple instances. Edit your config file if it doesn't suite you, but know that if you do lower the number of instances you will probably encounter worse performance. The default should be OK.

Regarding memory usage, I believe Apache uses shared memory - five Apache processes using 9.2MB "each" actually use 9.2MB combined. In Apache2 the "processes" (as shown in top) are actually different threads in the same single Apache2 process.

Addition (edited post): Memory usage is measured quite differently in Linux than in Windows. In Windows, if the NT/2K/XP/03 Task Manager shows 200MB used by programs, that's what is actually in active used, in-RAM swap is not shown by default. The top and free in Linux include the amount of memory used as in-RAM swap. So to get a more Windows-like representation of used memory check the "buffers/cache" line in the output from free -m.


Håkan