On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 08:56:00AM +1300, Gun Caundle wrote:
I'm a newbie using RH9 In system monitor is see my memory usage is 303Mb, total 312Mb. CPU usage is between 2% - 5% with no significant processes running.
1. Why is so much memory being used? 2. What could be using it? 3. If a process was running, would the memory become full and start using swap space?
Any modern operating system tries to make sure all memory is being used for something useful. You will probably find that lots of the memory is allocated for "buffers" and "cache" if you run "top" from the command line, or gtop (in gnome). This means that files that have been loaded off disk since boot are kept in memory, in case they are requested for loading again. The Virtual Memory Manager will kick files out of the cache if memory is required for running processes. John McPherson