Slowly all my memory gets used up by fedora (2 GB)

[Anne Wilson]

On Tuesday 10 April 2007, Mark wrote:
> Hey,
>
> i`ve had this problem for a while (since FC5 if `im right) and slowly all
> my memory gets used up.
> i did the top command but that doesn`t show anything unusual besides that
> all my memory is used.
> i`m using Gnome.
>
> this is the top of top:
>
> top - 23:00:23 up  3:37,  3 users,  load average: 0.17, 0.11, 0.08
> Tasks: 118 total,   1 running, 116 sleeping,   1 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 50.0%us, 50.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,
> 0.0%st
> Mem:   2038076k total,  1939184k used,    98892k free,   430052k buffers
> Swap:  2031608k total,        0k used,  2031608k free,   941860k cached
>
> The swap file isn`t being used.. but still the memory is filled up. in this
> case i still have 98MB left but i`ve seen less.
> is this a bug?
> or is this the memory management of linux?
>
>

The latter.  You've paid for it, so you use it :-)  Linux doesn't handle 
memory in the same way as windows does.  It uses all it can get, just 
releasing whatever it needs to, whenever it needs to.  The time to worry is 
when your swap is also used up :-)

I've just been running some heavy processing work, and my swap had 220MB used.  
Most of the time it isn't used at all.  IOW, my box works well for ordinary 
work, but is somewhat underspecified for the heavier processing.

Anne