Hello All,
I am running Red Hat 8.0 on my laptop

After booting to run level 3 the free memory is around 180MB

But when I start up X at level 5 the free memory falls to 90MB

After running a few applications such as Word - the free memory falls to only 4 MB


Can anyone tell me how I can control the processes to start at init 4 and 5 and which are those processes I require just to have a basic X-Windows environment (GNOME) so I can get to a terminal (command prompt).
I am looking to have around 120MB free memory when I start X. Alternatively what processes can I kill off safely once I am in X to free up memory?

Also is there any command which frees up memory held up by applications/processes which are no longer active?

the kernel will free memory when it needs it, your worried about a non-issue here.

Sorry it is not a non issue to me - I need to run some database applications for which I need to make available the max memory possible. I do know there are more answers - Please can anyone else help

This is where you system will come into play. Just because its not free doesn't mean your database won't recieve the proper memory allocation.

Linux loads as much as possible into memory, it actually uses it unlike other OS's out there.

When you launch your database app, it should recieve the amount of RAM it needs to properly run.

Also this is where your swap file comes into play.

If you desperatly need RAM though, don't run X, that is where most of the RAM is being used.

As the MOD already mentioned...its a non-issue really. The kernel does seem to take all the memory, but when you do launch a new application memory is automatically freed.

Are you have any problems running your database apps??

Regards
theN

deleted my rant....