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Does anyone know a good way to free up some of your memory in linux. Most of the time i'm using 90% of my physical memory and 0% swap space. I've disabled programs I dont need plus i added 256mb of ram the other day and it just ate it up.
Try running "top" and pressing "M" to sort by memory usage. it sounds like you may be running a program with a memory leak if it ate up all the new 256.
How much of the memory used is cache?
I have a 1GB of RAM and Linux still uses 90%
even though only about 128MB is actual programs
the rest is cache. Linux will store as much as it
can in memory to speed things up. HD access
takes forever compared to memory. So no matter
how much memory you have Linux will try to use
almost all of it. It's a really nice system and it speeds
up things alot. OTOH it is a good policy to not
run anything you don't need. You can take a look
at ps aux to give you an idea about what programs
are running. Then you can remove anything you
don't use from your init scripts.
I think I may be having some sort of memory leak.
I'm running RH8 with all the current updates from up2date.
1gb in memory dual amd 2gig processors.
The system for the most part sits idol.
If I count all the memory allocated to programs I get somewhere in the 200-300 range. Yet I'm at 95% used.
Programs and Services:
Gnome, wget (daily backup from main server), apache, iptables, php with optimizer, mysql, pretty much everything from a full install.
Anyhow, is there a way to test for memory leaks or perform some sort of flush/refresh?
Thanks.
----------------------
I'm no expert, but i know not to type rm -rf /
Yes, it is helpful understand the two commands you gave me. Obviously, what i see is that cache is growing so large that it leaves the system unstable to handle any new processes.
Is there a way to limit cache and buffer from eating all available system memory?
When extra physical memory is not in use, the kernel attempts to put it to work as a disk buffer cache. The disk buffer stores recently accessed disk data in memory; if the same data is needed again it can be quickly retrieved from the cache, improving performance. The buffer grows and shrinks dynamically to use the memory available, although priority is given to using the memory for paging. Thus, all the memory you have is put to good use.
That would be great, but instead of leaving 295MB free for immediate use. It only leaves 23MB free. This makes bring up Mozilla or using X in general slow in response. The system has even completely frozen on me a couple of times.
Top memory was fine, it was simply cache/buffer had taken up all the space. It matters not that computer since I was 'let go' from there the other day.
But I know on other systems I've worked with having the same trouble.
What I think I see perhaps is with the Hard Drive cached, when I run certain programs that demands a lot of memory at once. It either has to swap my active program in Swap-space, or it has to determine what is in its cache to keep and what to discard for space.
I wonder if in theory you don't want to have unused memory. but in practice to much cache/buffer can actually cause system lag.
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Memory Leak?
