I just recently put a 256 Meg stick into my Linux box and was quite satisifed to see no swap space being utilized. A few days later I looked and about 300/320 MB was used, up from 150/320MB. Does anyone have an idea about what is happening? I didn't start using any new programs. Just the same ones from when I botted up. Tripwire seems to go off alot where is the script that calls it?

--Tarballedtux

Heh your lucky I recently decided to try Mandrake I ran a couple of extra services sshd and httpd...and it now shows I have 124 services running and using 324 / 512 Meg of RAM except when I ran most of the same services as far as I can tell it only showed me running bout 50 services and only using 90 megs of RAM.....sooo... back to either Redhat 7.2, 7.3 or I am going to try Slackware just to see something else other than RedHat

linux is gonna use as much RAM as possible to cache stuff. it seems as if ur running out of memory, but ur not. the cached memory will make applications that have been loaded before start up faster and stuff like that but if u really need extra memory it will get rid of some of the cache and use whatever it just cleared. it'll never get rid of the entire cache though.

Just think of it as actually putting all that RAM to use.. what would be the point of having so much if its not being used.

I have 1GB of RAM isntalled on my system, and 512MB of swap space, and it will still use some swap, and register using over 512MB of RAM with only a few because of what Tricky said.

Its called speed and efficiency... something maybe M$ should learn about.

hmm maybe i should check my swap cuz i was running slow like i wouldnt believe...i re-installed redhat 7.2 and now i am only running at 60 megs of RAM with GAIM and xchat going

Yup I went from 256MB to 756MB and it's still maxed out when I run top, but the performance did speed up a bit.

Yup, its perfectly normal for Linux to cache files in RAM and nothing to worry about.

microsoft have made paranoids out of all of us. why is it that if all the RAM is being used, we immediately think that something is wrong? maybe because microsoft gives us nightmares about our RAM running out no matter how much of it we have (my WinME fills up 87-95% of the RAM just booting).
As trickykid says, why install the RAM if you don't want it used? to give it a nice little holiday?
as i say, it is a real shame that we all dive into panic mode when our RAM gets (gasp!!!) *used*... All microsoft's fault.

well i consider it not micro$oft's fault nor anybody's only time i see windows use that much memory is when i am burning a cd..or ripping a dvd...even running Seti@Home or UD Cancer Agent I never use more than 170 megs of Memory....I do have a problem with only having at most the 50 services checkmarked to start mandrake and when i boot it runs really slow shows me using most of my resources and then showing me using 124+ services and using 300+ megs of memory even sitting idle...though I have no clue how I was using over 100 services 0_o nor why it was using that much resources. Although in Redhat i top off at something close to 56 services and usually top out in 90 meg of RAM. So my opinion rather unhappy with mandrake. Don't think of this as a troll but you can not really say that someone getting paniced by system resources is micro$ofts fault.

If you only checked some 50 services when you installed Mandrake, and now more than 124 are running, I'd suspect that your system has been invaded and you may be running zombie code for one or more script kiddies! Your mention that tripwire keeps firing lends substance to that belief, too. Turning it off would be akin to taking the seat belts out of your car to silence the alarm...

You can use the Mandrake Control Center's "Services" section to disable any service that you don't want to have running, and you can stop any of them without having to reboot. I have only a dozen or so running here, including all my security stuff, Samba's two services, PostFix, and ProFTP. This greatly reduces my exposure to the baddies, but then I'm somewhat paranoid, having gotten invaded (via a Win95 system) during my first day of setting up Linux and having to reformat the drives on two of my five boxes!

I think was indicating that when windoze uses all RAM available too it, it bottlenecks processes and then things begin to crash. Or in 9x/ME you cannot do anything if RAM runs out and windows does not release it.

I had that problem on my ME install after playing UT even though I have a gig of ram on that machine - I solved this by disabling Virtual Memory altogether.