My memory is 256M.And now debian uses 240M or even above.I know that many of the used
memory is cache.But it is too frighting.The reason why I chose debian after I have experienced other distributions is that it uses little memory.I still remember the first time,not long before, I haved installed woody and configured it properly,it just used 90M memory.Why?

i dont see why this memory useage would scare you? is there any reason for this? it will run fine with 256MB, and memory is usally cheap, unless you got RD or something special. I have run it fine on 128MB systems with no issues. so in the end you will be fine. i guess you could always configure what programs are in use, or trim the kernel.

maybe you should just update the memory, like i said not too expensive if you got somethign standard.

How do you measure the memory usage? Usually top shows memory usage around 95% no matter now much RAM you actually have.

If you want to minimize memory usage, you have to look at the desktop and programs you are using. Choice of distro matters less. Drop KDE and gnome and use something lightweight instead (I am using fvwm). Avoid memory-hungry programs (unfortunately browsers belong to this category). Use xdm instead of kdm/gdm, there are ways to make X11 less memory-hungry as well.

In fact, I believe 256M is enough for everyday work. Don't bother unless you really are short of RAM.

best,
Ott

That is all there's to it. As long as the swap area isn't used under normal conditions you have plenty of memory. I have always been pleased with Linux using all available memory, so my investment in memory is not a waste of money.

I tried Debian Sarge and it behaved rather good!
About memory. I have double channel on my Asus board and 512MB of Corsair.
Indicator will almost always show you that memory usage bar is full. Ignore that, unless your swap is full too

it'll move the unneeded data to swap when you need it for something else (ithink it does anyway), I got debian running pretty fast on this computer using 64mb,

Off topic: I had this old computer to run all this and it still had reasonable speed
Openoffice- with a spreadsheet and writer document open
Mozilla firefox- 2 windows one with 117 tabs
Gaim
Few Eterms an Aterm and Konsole
anjuta, gimp 2 (with a 1024x768 image open), cinepaint
Konqueror
idesk
and fluxbox with xfree86 running 60 mb of ram is always used whether i have all that^ or hardly anything running.

im running sarge with 256 and it flies. nothing to worry about

Why has it just used 90M,and now it uses 190M,I get this from top command and
gnome-system-monitor.And I used to think it is the cause of updating system,so
I reinstall it,but the same case!Is it the cause of gnome and X-window,Because except gnome and X-window other softwares is from the old CDs.And the two is installed via internet

If the memory is used by cache you really don't need to worry about it. What's in the cache is the data you have accessed before. It's in the memory so that next time you access it, linux won't need to fetch it from the disk again. The momory used by cache will be freed if other programs request memory. I once wrote a program that will use about 1G of memory. Our server has 1.2G of memory. Before I ran my program, top showed 900M of the memory was used, majorly by cache. After my program finished, top showed only 100M of the memory is used. This is because linux freed the cache and give 1G memory to my program, then when my program finished, it released the 1G memory. So although at first top showed 900M memory is used, actually only 100M is used.
To find out the actually amout of memory used, we can use the free command
top will show 283140k memory is used, but actually 116216k of them is used by cache, so the amount of memory actually used is 130528k.

I have 289MB of ram but a 566MHZ but i can not run the latest gnome or kde at a reasonable speed. So i use fvwm or another light window manager.

It is gnome which is eating up your memory, not linux.

Thank all of you,especially mp55.Oh,my linux just uses 120M,less than my windows

i'm running Debian Sid with Firefox (2 tabs), KDE and Xmms running and I'm only using 179MB of ram (out of 190). My system is a dual 350mhz PII with a custom compiled 2.6.10 kernel and Debian runs great. I can even play QuakeWorld with no problem.