Recovering Resources

[robin laing]

David L Norris wrote:

>On Sat, 2004-01-03 at 14:09, David C. Hart wrote:
>  
>
>>>Why, was it malfunctioning somehow?
>>>      
>>>
>>No. I added a NIC.
>>    
>>
>
>Aha, your wording gave me the impression the reboot was related to the
>memory usage.
>
>  
>
>>>Pay attention to your -/+ buffers/cache.  That shows I'm using 134980 KB
>>>for running processes (used - buffers).  That means I have 379628 KB
>>>free for running processes (free + cache).  
>>>      
>>>
>
>Err, that should be (used - buffers/cache) and (free + buffers/cache). 
>I never was good at addition and subtraction.  ;-)
>
>  
>
I will add a comment for the newer users.  I was confused about the 
issue of free memmory as well.  It took alot of reading and I finally 
learned that as people have stated, memory is very dynamic in Linux.  
Linux will attempt to store as much information in ram as possible in 
case it is needed.  It will dump the older data if more memory is 
needed.  I spent three days trying to get this in a context that I 
understood.  It isn't like windows where memory usage is an indication 
of processes running.

I have run linux on computers for months without reboots being required, 
even after doing updates/upgrades, unlike windows.