Re: tlug: Caldera Japanese version (more comments)

[Mike Fabian <mike.fabian@example.com>]

"Scott M. Stone" <sstone@example.com> writes:

> The thing that scares me is that my memory/swap usage never seems to
> go DOWN when I close apps.... well, a little bit.  but my swap usage
> almost NEVER goes down by more than 1 or 2 MB.

I have observed the same phenomenon, my memory/swap usage never seems
to go down. Currently `free' gives me the output:

mike@example.com ~$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        127952     123116       4836      33276      17352      22324
-/+ buffers/cache:      83440      44512
Swap:       160608      34544     126064

although I have closed most applications. As far as I remember is has
always been like this, even with Kernels 2.0.x.

> Eventually my system gets so slow that I have to completely reboot
> it to make it fast again,

But I never experienced any slowdown due to the high memory usage
shown by `free'. My system is running now for more than two weeks:

mike@example.com ~$ uptime
  9:06am  up 15 days, 11:42,  5 users,  load average: 1.01, 1.03, 1.00
mike@example.com ~$ uname -a
Linux nozomi 2.2.13 #5 Tue Oct 26 09:04:54 CEST 1999 i686 unknown

and is doesn't seem to be any slower than after a reboot.

Therefore I guessed there is nothing wrong with my system, only the
output of `free' is kind of misleading.

> *even if I close all my apps and restart from the same point as if I
> were to reboot the box*...  sometimes just shutting down X and
> bringing it back up helps, but not as much as the reboot.  Is there
> something wrong with memory allocation/freeing in the 2.2 kernels?
> Or am I just stupid?  Or both?

I would also like to know why `free' and `top' display such strange
values about memory usage.

Mike

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mike.fabian@example.com>   <mike@example.com>
In der Neckarhelle 81, D-69118 Heidelberg-Ziegelhausen
Telephone: +49(0)6221/809222
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