Hello guys! This is the result of the free command.

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 449784 395020 54764 0 26900 172124
-/+ buffers/cache: 195996 253788
Swap: 674656 29404 645252

I have 2 konsoles and firefox open. Seems like the system is using a lot of memory. Is this normal? My system RAM is 512 mb. Thanks.

-bhert

196mb... doesn't seem massively over the top if you're also running KDE 3 or somethign equally heavy.

The way memory is used can be compared to juggling skills: keeping balls in the air. Each action that influences memory usage is another ball to add. Before you start juggling you need to think about how you will accomplish this. What do you do when you have three? Throw two higher (swapping)? At onehundred? Throw away ten in favour of keeping ninety up (ze dreaded OOM)? That you call a strategy. The strategy of the Linux kernels VMM (Virtual Memory Manager aka the juggler in this example) is to try and give you the best performance by maximising memory usage. So the amount of memory that is "free" is not an indication the situation is "abnormal" and this is explained in a lot of threads at LQ: just search. Parts of the VMM strategy are tunable using sysctl (see values with: sysctl -a | grep vm) and there's lots of posts and HOWTO's that can help you tune it. Using swap however is way slower compared to RAM (disk I/O), so if there's a more than average amount of swapping going on it will slowly degrade performance because swapping itself also needs to be managed. Adding RAM is nearly always the easiest and best solution, else you could look for less memory-hogging alternatives.

Yeah, I am running kde 3.5.5, must be a memory hog. I forgot, I am also running superkaramba in the background too. I will see what I can do to juggle the virtual memory to get better performance. Thanks for the info guys.

-bhert