Linux - NewbieThis Linux forum is for members that are new to Linux.
Just starting out and have a question?
If it is not in the man pages or the how-to's this is the place!
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
I'm running MythTV on an Athlon 2800 with a gig of RAM. I'm recording HDTV so I have a lot of data flying back and forth but I should have enough horsepower to handle it. When I run 'top' I can see that I am using a ton of memory and sometimes my box has to resort to the swap partition. I have a couple of questions regarding the top output (below) because things don't seem to add up.
- What is the difference in active vs inactive memory. Is inactive memory that is allocated but just not being used at the moment?
- Are all these kdeinit processes normal (I;m on KDE 3.1) and does X normally consume over 130M of memory?
- My million dollar question is who is using all of this memory because if I total up the amount used by all of these process I don't get anywhere near 963372k used. /proc/meminfo shows me that 738M is cached but what process is caching it.
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 the usage of your expensive and speedy memory.
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.
I can't say that I have got a full grip on the different memory allocations or exacly where to look for available memory size.
My experince is that if the swap is being eaten up, not just a tiny bit, then the memory is getting crowdy. I have a 256MB on Suse roght now and that seems too small.
ok so it sounds like the occasional hit on swap isn't a problem, only if I am ~constantly swapping do I need to add more memory? How does linux determine what to cache from the harddrive? In my case I'm viewing video which is constantly changing so the odds seem pretty low of me accessing the same data from the harddrive over and over again...doesn't seem like cache would buy much in my situation.
Recently read and written data is kept in memory till the memory is needed for other things.
Periodically data is written to drive, but the data is kept till memory is needed by other processes.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.