Hi,

Maybe this is covered in another tread... I looked but did not find.

I dual boot Windows XP and Mandrake 10.0. I would get rid of windows completely but I do quite a bit of video editing and there are no linux solutions for me. So anyways... here is my question.

In Windows XP there is a registry trick that a person can do to make sure that when an application is shutdown the memory will be recovered. It is the "AlwaysUnloadDll" key that is put into the windows registry under the Explorer applicaiton. This is very nice as it forces the RAM to give back those addresses as free.

Is there a similar trick in Linux? I notice that when I've had my system running for quite some time and have used various appliations (Mozilla, OpenOffice, Kedit, xmms, totem, etc.) my physical memory usage gets extremely high and my system slows down quite a bit. (Meaning that it takes quite a while for applications to load into memory to execute). A reboot usually does the trick but sometimes I just do not want to have to restart my system.

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

My Hardware in case its needed for feedback...

Abit AI7 Motherboard
Pentium 4 2.4C
512MB Kingston PC3200
ATI All In Wonder 9600XT
Western Digital 160GB 7200RPM 2MB
NEC ND-2510A Dual Layer DVDRW

I'm not aware of it existing. Linux uses memory a lot better than windoze. It is set up to make the system run faster and more efficient. Linux doesn't have some of the problems with memory usage that windoze has so what you want is not needed and would actually make the system slower.

I have 1GB of memory and it fills up pretty soon afiter using a lot of programs. Most of the memory usage you see is cache, not program data like windoze or memory that has 'leaked' into oblivion. As far you noticing it getting slower, maybe you're just used to windoze. I have timed mine, it is always faster the second time I open a program. The program is stored as cache, sort of like the cache on the hard drive. It makes it faster, not slower. Not sure why yours would be 'slower'. May be something else going on there.

Get a stop watch and time it. See what measured results are.

dalek,

Thanks for the reply. I'll take you're word about linux using memory better than windows. I've heard this many times over. I thought maybe it was a bug in the new distro of Mandrake.

Take care.....

Linux manages memory a lot better. I know of no programs that have issues with hogging memory. Most programs don't use a lot anyway. Open Office, a huge program, only uses about 5MBs on mine. Mozilla uses about 7MBs. I am currently using 230MBs. I have Mozilla, Mozilla mail, Kppp, a Konsole, Konqueror, Spider solitaire, gkrellm, Open Office and the GUI to go with that.

I'm not sure windoze can have that many open at one time. Sure would fill up the screen pretty quick.

Mandrake is a good distro to start out with. That was what I had. I now have Gentoo. Get your feet wet, then move on to better more 'advanced' distro.

Welcome to Linux. Hope you enjoy it.

Linux uses unused main memory as a disk cache, but if an application requests more memory than is actually free the cache is reduced to provide the memory for the application.

In KDE you can view your memory usage by opening the KDE Control Centre (which is probably listed as Configure Your Desktop in the mandrake menus ) and taking a look under Information | Memory.

If you're in a terminal, you can also use cat /proc/meminfo and add together the values for MemFree, Buffers and Cached to get the amount of available ram in your pc or you can simply run free. Your available free memory will be displayed with the buffer/cache adjustment in the second row.

If youre using Mandy 10, there is a cron job that runs that chews memory like crazy. It would max mine out, and never release it for some reason, making the computer slow (yes, I timed it over many trials). Once I turned off the cron job under system services in the MCC, problem solved. Possibly a memory leak there? I dont know, but thats what fixed me. Hope that helps.

Thanks for all of your feedback.

I decided to move on to SuSE 9.1. I found an article on building a DVD of the full FTP mirror and it worked great. So.... my Mandrake headaches are now officially over. I used versions 9.2 and 10.0 but now that I've seen what SuSE is all about I doubt if I'll ever use another distro. I tried Debian once but it confused me to no end and I couldn't even finish the install.

Peace!

Just so you will know, it doesn't matter what distro you use, the memory usage will be about the same. There may be a small difference from one kernel version to another but not much difference between distros.

I used Mandrake for a while too. It sort of got to be a headache when upgrading. It is good to get your feet wet though.

Later