Memory Management
 

I have a Athlon 850MHz w/ 256mb RAM. I used to have Win2k installed until I got fed up w/ MS. In windows, I had at least 186mb of free RAM available. In Linux, I have about 8mb free. My swap file is 384mb. Why does Linux seem to run so slowly and hog so much more memory than Win2k? I really like Linux but I need to get my performance back. Also, I only have two partitions, one for my swap and the other on is all for my storage needs, I have a 15gig HD.

Hi Mrsolo, Welcome to the wonderful land of Linux.

First off, the ideal memory usage is to rum everything out of ram. Only when your ram is full should program fragments start spilling into your swap. This explains your 8meg from ram. This dosn't explain your system running slowly. I would run top for a while to see who your top cpu user is. -mk

Its normal for Linux to fill up memory..( this is asked all the time btw ) and don't worry about it. If your system is slow, check the processes running, eliminate any you don't need, and the only time you need to worry about memory is if your swap gets filled up.. most of the time it shouldn't even get touched..

It just seems that Linux runs slower than Win2k, is there anything that I can do to increase performance?

Like I mentioned in my previous post, eliminate any processes running that you don't need.. like http(webserving) and that sort of thing..

You could fool around with the program 'hdparm' and try to get your harddrive to run faster. When I did this I saw a substantial performance boost. Try searching the forums for 'hdparm' as there has been many threads dedicated to it.

If u can provide output of these commands

top
vmstat
and ps auwx

df -h
that ll be nmore helpful to figure out why ur machine ir responding slow. However your hard drive performance is also a key issue.
use hdparm -t /dev/urpartition no here to check out

I downloaded hdparm 5.2, how do I install it?