Memory

[Sharpe, Sam J]

2009/6/9 Yoram Halberstam <yoram.halberstam at gmail.com>:
> All,
>
> I'm new to linux and I've got a FC10 with no server database or other
> servers (that I can think of) up yet - SAMBA maybe.
>
> Anyway, my memory last night was up to 2GB - I expected a basic system to be
> 500m or less...?!
>
> How can I find out the culprit processes and make my system leaner? Any
> website to tell me what each processes in memory does to check if I need it?

Type the word "free -m" on a command line. It will look like this:

[sam at sam ~]$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3844       2309       1534          0        154       1531
-/+ buffers/cache:        623       3221
Swap:         3999         41       3958


The amount you are looking for is the number following "-/+
buffers/cache" - which in my case is 623MB (on a Desktop system)

The reason this number is lower than the actual memory usage is that
154+1531MB of memory is being used for the buffers and cache - which
increase performance. Linux only drops Memory when it needs to,
otherwise it keeps the pages just in case they are needed again.

-- 
Sam