mandrake virtual memory
 

Im running Mandrake 10.0, kernel 2.6, I have a Duron 1.6 80 gig harddrive and 512mb of physical memory, I just did a clean install and have only downloaded a few basic programs and drivers. And yet when I have no programs open my system monitor says that Im using about 85% to 90% of my memory, is there any way to turn up my virtual memory or something similiar to help, or could there be something else eating all my ram?

hi there


does this memory usage show all the time or for some time
because itmay happen that some backgreound process are running
so check out for them

also see for what services ur are running
try close down the services not required

regadrs

Yes its all the time, how could I check which processes are required and which are not?

hi

run

"top"
and see what processes are taking ur memory more

regards

How are you measuring your memory usage? That could be your problem. Linux caches ram when left running for a while. It's completely normal. For example, I have 1024MB of ram and have been up for several days. My free ram is reported as 8MB. However the vast majority of the used ram is for disk cache and disk buffers.
The cached ram is available when needed so it's really free; it's just being used for disk cache at the moment to cut down on disk reads until some more pressing need comes along.
Take a look at kde control center>Information>Memory to get a nice graphical breakdown of how your ram is really being used. Note how much is disk cache or disk buffers.
If your really using all your ram, you will start getting out of memory reports and a lot of swap usage which will severely effect performance. If that's the case, run:

$ top

and see what's hogging all your memory. "X" will normally be the biggest percentage user. See if there's some other process that is running a very high percentage of your memory.

I think that was it, I did not know about the memory cacheing, because when I checked what processes were running nothing looked out of place. Thanks for the info.
I never realized how advanced Linux really is, I feel like a fool for not switching earlier!