alright, I was curious which processes were sucking up my already pitiful hardware setup

I ran: ps aux, vmstat, top, and free -mo => one or two probably would have given me enough info, but I"m a newbie and I"m checking stuff out

here's the output I seem to be getting:

the swap (huge because I have more harddrive than hardware) is not being used at all as far as I know-- everything is reporting 0;

the mem used is reporting around 150-170 (~~150 in console, and 170 while runniing mozilla and a few xterms) of about 186 w/ 9 megs for buffers-- 192 megs total

the top percentages-- I actually added them-- are around 40% (are these percentages of the "used" mem, of "total"?)-- where'd the other 40-50% go?

anyways-- I am running a junker-- I realize that, but it seems like some of this should add up

**most importantly-- is there something I can do about the swap-- or is it only used when there is major system consumption-- and not, basically idle like I am now

anyways, a lot of rambling for a simple question

thanx

Nate Snow(broke-a$$ high school student)

Check whether there's a line like
in your /etc/fstab ...

Cheers,
Tink

And more importantly, I believe you should be told about Linux memory usage. It's smart. It uses all your RAM to make things run faster. What a brilliant idea So, since this is happening, it looks like you will "run out" of memory, however it shares it much better than you may think. As long as the swap does exist as Tink has suggest, you are probably fine. Search this site for swap info, there's gonna be at least a page if not 10 It's a hot topic when one is just learning about the way Linux actually uses memory.

Cool

yep

/dev/hdb3 swap swap defaults 0 0


as far as the memory:

I was kinda wondering if it just loaded stuff into the memory-- mozilla is slow starting and then lightning fast; but how do I know which processes I can axe if I don't have a good representation of how much relative mem they're consuming. and what memory is it not reporting in ps, etc? I mean, the programs only account for about half of the memory. It seems like it should have a listing like system or kernel or mem manager= 40%

If you've got a quick answer-- great. If not, I'll read up on memory management, and I will read the pages about swap's on the site. Thanx a lot

Nate

top. I think top is probably going to help with what you are looking for.



Cool

Another very nice tool for monitoring
process status & memory usage :)

It displays processes as coloured blobs
in a lava-lamp, their size representing
their memory usage, their vertical position
their CPU usage and the brightness of the
colour their activity ... :)

Once you come to know what process
gets what colour (and they always get
same one!) it's quite intuitive ;)

Cheers,
Tink

Whoa, that's pretty cool!

How well does it work for systems that run many processes all the time?

Cool

Hi Master ...

Works great here, for me and a few colleagues :)

One of them has 256MB RAM and still gets a
swapper usage of 150MB ... go figure how well
it works ;)

Cheers,
Tink