I just checked my memory usage under System Monitor for SuSe 9.0 distro.

Under Gnome and KDE, I'm using over 700MB of memory out of my 1 gig... that is alot considering I wasn't running any applications at the time. I checked the processes and of course X-Windows is running a huge amount of it, but is there a way to drop the memory usage down, cuz I know that there are people out there running Linux without a Gig of memory.

I just wondering if there is a way to figure out what processes I need and also setting them to not start up each time I log in.

Thx

i think your getting fooled, just like many other users ...
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...631#post475631

read what i said in that thread, and you'll have a much better understanding, on how
memory is managed in linux

Not really. Why have 1GB of memory if you do not want it to be used.
Linux has a different view on the memory than windows.
Instead of trying to keep as much free memory as possible Linux tries to maximaze memory usage. Linux has a dynamic handling of buffers and cache meaning that if memory is available linux will increase the buffers so that next time that same info is needed from the hard disk it will be in memory instead.

Well that is nice to know, I understand that philosophy and think it is better idea. I just was worrying that I was going to run some memory intensive program one day and not have enough free memory.

I'll going to use that free -m command next time I'm in Linux and see really how much free memory I have after adding up the buffer, etc.

Thx DrOzz and Michaelk.

I'm also a newbie, and just finished installing slackware on a Pentium 150 Mhz machine with about 64 Mb of memory. Just to validate what is being said here, I have found that KDE runs just fine with these restrictions.

Mike Witt

You can always create unlimited swap space if you are paranoid about having to little memory although each swap file or swap partition can only have a capacity of 2 GB or 2048 MB.

Keeping with the rules, i did a search and came up with this topic before i was going to post my own.

I too have a problem with the "disk cache". I have 1 gig and after about an hour of using my computer (yes i open and close a lot of stuff and build software) my memory is almost at the max!! What's with this? I read the stuff above, but should i use "free -m" to purge all of that disk cache so i don't have to reboot to play UT2004? My other box (amdxp 2000, 512ram) always hovers around 300 and the memory doesn't seem to get out of control. What's going on here? I must be something wrong.