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Memory footprintMemory footprintPosted Jun 13, 2006 0:34 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104)Parent article: Live CDs Part II: Desktop Replacements
As with KNOPPIX, this GNOME desktop system is heavy on memory use, using 219MB out of 224MB available according to "top". This is expected behavior for this class of live CDs so be certain to have plenty of memory.What is that memory used for? I this a good chunk of it is used for cache and filesystem buffers. In fact, my system with 1 gigabyte of RAM is currently using 979732k, of which 61684k is "buffers" and 676912k is "cached". The memory usage without buffers and cache is 241136k, which is not so bad, considering that I have 4 tabs open in Firefox plus 6 xterm windows. And this is a 64-bit system. I hope the author will learn something about memory management before posting the review for "Small Footprint live CDs".
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Memory footprint Posted Jun 13, 2006 1:28 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] To be fair, there isn't really a way to figure out much about memory use from the output of top or htop; they give too confusing a picture.
Memory footprint Posted Jun 13, 2006 5:18 UTC (Tue) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] Agreed. It's been a long standing complaint "Linux uses all my memory! Where did it go?" going back to probably before I started using Linux, back in 1993.
Most of it does go to disk buffers and shared pages. My own motto is unused memory is wasted memory. The real performance analysis comes from looking at things like vmstat, and whether you have lots of swap or paging traffic.
Available = "Free" (unused) + Cached Posted Jun 13, 2006 6:30 UTC (Tue) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link] I teach my students that the best, simplest approximation of their available memory is the "cached" *plus* "free" (which I translate to "unused" to better explain the meaning in top and the "free" command).
Yes, it's an simplication; but it's a useful one.
Then I teach them to watch the si and so (swap in and swap out) columns under vmstat for at least a couple minutes of sustained three digit values before declaring their system to be "out of memory."
JimD
Available = "Free" (unused) + Cached Posted Jun 13, 2006 6:57 UTC (Tue) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] Another, more reliable indicator of being truly out of memory is when vmstat takes 5 minutes paging itself in before outputting each line :)
Available = "Free" (unused) + Cached Posted Jun 13, 2006 19:05 UTC (Tue) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] > simplest approximation of their available memory is> the "cached" *plus* "free" Why you aren't adding "buffers" too?
Memory footprint Posted Jun 15, 2006 19:59 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] If you "cat /proc/meminfo", the first few lines are:MemTotal: 516228 kB MemFree: 51432 kB Buffers: 19104 kB Cached: 133532 kB SwapCached: 131464 kB In my case, I have a total of 516 megabytes of memory (after the kernel's had its bite, and yes it's a decimal megabytes from binary kilobytes. I don't care). Of this 51 megs isn't used for anything, and 131 megs is sitting in swap (although since I've suspended the system to disk since booting, both are kinda expected). About 150 megs (buffers+cached) are used for filesystem cache. That's the amount that your apps aren't really using, and the number you might want to subtract from the total when coming up with how much memory is really in use by your apps. I'd estimate I easily have over 100 open windows/tabs in my six desktops at the moment, by the way... Rob
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