Hi,

You are not interpreting top properly! Why do you think the linux os is multitasking or processing? The memory management for linux is great! Would you rather have your memory sit idle rather than active?

Who ever told you a i386 kernel would use less memory had to be talking about the kernel image not the management. The memory management for the i386 is not the same as the i486. Another major difference between the i386 and i486 is the co-processor is integrated on the i486 with the i386 the floating point co-processor is a separate chip.

The i486 pipeline is the speed advantage for the i486, the instructions sets are the same for the i386 or i486. The fourth generation i486 has a major speed advantage over the i386 because of the pipeline.

You should read some background information about the intel series processors, check out processors.

Hearsay will only get you into trouble!

I was thinking I was misinterpreting memory in top wrong since I've been hearing for years that Linux is good with memory management. I've noticed in top that the memory always increases but never decreases again till you reboot...get the info on the memory from top before startx, after startx, and after closing startx and you will see what I mean. The memory must refresh once startx closes, but top doesn't reflect that.

Not 100% sure, but I think it's just the way Linux's memory management is. It keeps everything it cache incase you need it again, and if not flushes it for something else requesting memory.

Not 100% sure though, but that's how it was explained to me when I was a n00b.

Yes, it's something like that. And when too much memory is requested at once, like running 2 or more programs which require alot of memory at once, the old cached data is transfered to the swap. I have 512MB DDR 333Mhz PC2700 RAM with 1024MB swap space and in all my time using Linux the max use of my swap space was 1MB, and that was when I was compiling glibc from source, using OpenOffice, music, IM, copying some files from my NTFS partition and running another program which name I can't remember now. And I've never felt that my computer moves slower than it should. On Window$ I did feel my memory was not managed properly, and there too had 1024MB fixed Pagefile which was used at least half mostly all the time.

guess that's why Win experiences the blue screen of death and Linux keeps on humming away! Anyway, I added an old 128 MB SDRAM stick I had and now it doesn't cache as often as it was with 256 MB physical memory now. Thanks for all the help!

Exactly. So don't waste time worring about memory management as that really isn't a problem with Linux... When and if you'll get to 512MB or more you will hardly need a swap space at all.