Excessive ram usave under SuSE 9.1
 

I am running SuSE 9.1 Pro on an amd64 with 1 gig of ram. Things seem to work quite well, but I noticed something that makes me wonder if SuSE is a ram hog or maybe I have some hardware problems.

Just sitting at the desktop with no programs running i opened a terminal and typed in the " free " command and got this:

Have Used Free
1028572 627836 400736

Isn't this a rather excessive amount of ram usage just to be at desktop? Is SuSE 9.1 a ram hog, or do I have some other problem? What you think guys, what kind of numbers does SuSE give you with the free command?

What services are you running while "sitting at the desktop"? If postfix, cupsd, etc are all running, then I could see a lot of resources being used. If you are running KDE while running all the default services then it is not unusual to see a lot of RAM used.

Suse automatically loads your most frequently used programs, so they will launch faster when you want to run them. That's where your memory is going.

Under Kmenu goto System->Monitor->KDE System Guard then you can see whats loaded and how much ram each is using.
I have only 192meg and i too have only 47% free. I believe it's just how ram is utilised. If you have 1 gig why not load it up half way with what you might use and unload as that space is required? As well there may be some unnecissary things loaded by default install that you can loose by refining your config. ie. various modules etc..

Linux manages memory differently than Windows. This article gives a good explanation as to why so much RAM appears to be in use -- J.W.

Thanks
 

Thanks guys now i understand a bit more about ram usage in linux. Had me kind of worried there for a bit as to what was going on. On checking the installed stuff i see it shows 74 processes so i can see where ram usage could be rather high. Problem is I don't know what the majority of them are as they are installed by default. Is there someplace that would tell me just what each of these processes are so that I could know if I could delete them if not needed?

Example:

What is mingetty ? It says I have 6 of them running...

What is kwrited?

What is kwrapper ?

Thanks for the help...

the mingettys are listening for you to do a ctrl+alt+ [f2 - f7], to open a virtual terminal(s), i don't know anyone who needs 6 of them though. the kwrited and kwrapper are just goop that comes along with the k desktop.

kwrited is the process for the kwrite text editor in KDE and kwrapper sounds like something from Open Office.