I have SUSE linux 10.0 and I run KDE. I have 448 mb of ram (64 for onboard graphics) and running firefox right now with all of the background processes uses 431mb of ram. There seems to be alot of unecessary processes running. I set printer daemon to not start through Yast since I don't have a printer and this gave me about 5mb. Does anyone know of any unnecessary daemons or processes that I coud get rid of to free up some ram?

how much RAM is your firefox using?? you can drastically reduce the amount of RAM firefox uses by tweaking the value of browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers with about:config...

have a look: http://www.google.com/search?q=brows..._total_viewers

did you get those values via the "top" command?

If so, some of that used ram is cached disk data and will be freed as needed. This is quite normal. If I leave my machine (1gb ram) running for a while and do some disk-based tasks, I have about 150mb free, and about 500mb of cached data.

Yes, my ram was being used as cache. I opened up 20 or so applications and my ram usage actually decreased! That is great that my ram is being used as cache instead of just sitting there. Thanks alot!

the RAM cache thing is true, and it's a common cause for concern for a lot of people new to linux's way of dealing with memory...

however, i would like to point-out that it is unrelated to firefox's extremely high memory usage... if you want to conserve ram, i suggest you consider tweaking browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers...

by tweaking browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers i was able to reduce my firefox's average memory usage (during heavy browsing) from about 160MB to 60MB... that's about 100MB of saved RAM - which would NOT have been released by the system if something else needed it (unlike the cached RAM you see in "top")... with this tweak, many people have experienced far greater RAM usage reduction than i have...

This article by sapphirecat on Linux Memory Management may be of interest

What would you suggest to be an appropriate setting? I was suprised to see that mine was set to -1 rather than some positive number.

it depends on how much ram you have, what kinda surfing you do, what kinda results you desire, etc... but yeah, -1 is the default, which makes firefox calulate it's own setting depending on how much ram you have... i have 512MB and firefox was using WAY too much of my ram... so i've set it to 1... first i tried setting it to 0 to see what it was like with the feature disabled, but the loading time for pages when going back was greatly affected, as was the surfing experience... so i've settled for a setting of 1, as it provides me with the snappiness i need while hogging as little of my ram as possible... my guess is that most people with 256MB or more would be happy enough with a setting of 1 or 2...