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06-12-2006, 09:12 AM
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#1
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Member
Registered: Jun 2005
Posts: 34
Rep:
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extensive ram being used
I've got a fresh Slack 10.2 installed, with 1GB of RAM, with only firefox running. Top shows me that I only have 90 MB of RAM free, and 7MB of swap are being used. Is there any reason that this much RAM should be used?
I don't know if this is normal either, but I only have one instance of firefox running, yet there are three instannces showing up in top.
Thanks for any help.
Let me know if you need any more system info.
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06-12-2006, 09:31 AM
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#2
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Member
Registered: Jul 2004
Distribution: Void Linux, former Slackware
Posts: 498
Rep: 
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Hard to say without another informations but Linux memory management allocates most of available memory in an advance although it's not currently used, so it looks allright.
On the other hand I don't see reason for used swap space, but as I said earlier more info's needed. I would start in runlevel with no/minimal proceses running and then start applications step by step looking at resources it consumes. System log may reveal some hw problems if any.
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06-12-2006, 10:05 AM
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#3
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Senior Member
Registered: Dec 2005
Location: Campinas/SP - Brazil
Distribution: SuSE, RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu
Posts: 1,508
Rep:
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The output of commands "free" and " swapon -s" are very usefull to help in debug this. Please, print their output.
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06-12-2006, 02:02 PM
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#4
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Member
Registered: Oct 2003
Distribution: Slackware64 13.1 x86_64, Ubuntu 10.04 x86_64
Posts: 121
Rep:
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Do you have the flash plugin for firefox? That has a known memory leak, very annoying.
If you close firefox does it release the memory?
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06-12-2006, 06:58 PM
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#5
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Senior Member
Registered: Dec 2004
Location: In my house.
Distribution: Ubuntu 10.10 64bit, Slackware 13.1 64-bit
Posts: 2,649
Rep:
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One more MAJOR thing:
Do you have large memory support (4GB) enabled in your kernel? If not, it will only use/show about 800MB
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06-12-2006, 07:59 PM
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#6
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Member
Registered: Jun 2005
Posts: 34
Original Poster
Rep:
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Thanks for different ideas. At the moment, I can't test them, since I rebooted, and an now only using 320 MB.
here's the swapon output:
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/hdg2 partition 2097136 0 -1
I know my swap drive is probably way bigger then I need.
Also, I have large memory support enabled in the kernel. The problem is that so much of it was being used by so few processes.
I'll post again if the problem comes back.
Thanks again
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06-12-2006, 11:16 PM
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#7
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Member
Registered: May 2004
Location: South Carolina
Distribution: Slackware 11.0
Posts: 606
Rep:
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Code:
anthony@Pismire:~$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 503 440 63 0 17 276
-/+ buffers/cache: 146 357
Swap: 972 0 972
anthony@Pismire:~$ uptime
23:09:22 up 9 min, 2 users, load average: 0.27, 0.64, 0.43
anthony@Pismire:~$ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
100
According to that, my pc has been up for 9 minutes and is using 440 megs of ram. It is entirely normal. It is used to cache program libraries or as a filesystem buffer, so the pc will run faster, and the cache/buffers are wiped when you need the ram for a heavy application.
It does not matter how much memory is reported as used, what matters is that you have enough ram to run the programs that you need to run. When you want to run a program that is say 900MB large, it loads that program into memory. Then, when you quit that program, parts of it stay in RAM as cache, so that when you go to load the program again it loads up quicker than before.
But if you need to load up another program, the kernel will automatically wipe the cache/buffers, and put memory into swap as needed to free up enough ram to run the process.
And swap usage is perfectly OK too. Sometimes I can get up to 300MB of swap usage, but my PC runs at perfect speeds, because the things that are swapped out are libraries that are not used often, and when they are used they are unloaded from swap and placed back into ram.(for example, if I have rtorrent running, but no torrents being seeded, after a few days or so rtorrent and libtorrent will be swapped out to free up ram, but they will be unswapped as soon as I need them.)
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06-13-2006, 01:23 AM
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#8
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Member
Registered: Jun 2005
Posts: 34
Original Poster
Rep:
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thanks for the info
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06-14-2006, 09:55 PM
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#9
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Senior Member
Registered: Sep 2003
Posts: 1,091
Rep:
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ajk48n
thanks for the info
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You firefox memory useage reported by top is correct. There was a firefox dev that explained why it uses so much in an article on the dreaded slashdot a few months back. Basically it keeps 7 pages cached in memory for EACH tab and instance you have open. On a slackware install with just x, fluxbox, aterm, and conky running I had it slimmed down to 30mb of memory useage. Open firefox and browse a couple of pages and it bumbed to 70+mb.
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06-14-2006, 10:01 PM
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#10
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Member
Registered: Jun 2003
Distribution: SuSE 11.0
Posts: 171
Rep:
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Well the latest Firefox memory requirements have gone up a bit - we are just gonna have to upgrade to furfill the 900MB minimum memory requirement for the latest Firefox
Yeah its tons of cache data of a sort.
BTW Seamonkey is very much fast & alive - lower mem requirements than Firefox Ive heard - wonderful world 
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06-14-2006, 10:36 PM
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#11
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Member
Registered: May 2004
Location: South Carolina
Distribution: Slackware 11.0
Posts: 606
Rep:
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For me, in memory usage, Epiphany < Galeon < Firefox < Mozilla 1.7x < Seamonkey.
But like i said, memory usage does not matter at all. What do you need the memory for? If you are running firefox, you need the RAM for web browsing. If you are running firefox on your machine, chances are it is not a high end database or server, and therefore the only real reason you would need that much ram is for gaming, and you wouldn't be gaming if you were running firefox anyway, and even if you were, firefox would eventually get swapped out anyway, and would then get swapped back in when you needed it.
It really is the most efficient way to do it.
If I had 4 gigs of ram, I would be VERY angry if anything LESS than 3.8GB was reported as being used. That means the OS is not properly using all of it's resources.(Even Windows XP is good at this now too) Cache and buffers make a massive speed increase on a machine, far more than just having 70MB used out of 4GB of ram, and having the other 3930MB just sitting there wasting money.
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