LinuxQuestions.org - Processes and memory?

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Processes and memory?

http://images.cjb.net/46c48.png

I have 256 MB of RAM. As you can see, the System Guard says that about 240 of them are being used... and the system is slower than it should be
Please, tell me how to find out which processes I don't need and how to setup which processes to be started when booting/or when X starts/. Thank you.
(I'm using Slackware 10.2 (2.6.16 kernel) but that's not very important, as far as this problem is concerned)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Itzuke

As you can see, the System Guard says that about 240 of them are being used...

Not really. You're using just under 100MB of RAM the rest (yellow) is cached and will be discarded when some process needs to allocate memory. Linux will always use almost the entire physical memory to store cached data no matter how much RAM you have:

Code:

demian@dirac ~$ free

            total      used      free    shared    buffers    cached

Mem:      1034664    1020748      13916          0      16272    612320

-/+ buffers/cache:    392156    642508

the last line gives you a better idea of the amount of memory that's available.

If you still want to check what processes use the most amount of memory run top and sort it by memory usage (M).