high memory usage

ROBO_DONUT · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jan 2005 Posts: 144

i recently emerged a few dockapps and happened to notice that the memory monitor seems to be really high. it says that my memory usage is 88% right now and swap usage is 0%. just after starting my computer usage is about 60%. i have a gigabyte of ram and i am running fluxbox. is this normal?

oumpah-pah · Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2005 11:55 am Post subject:

Yes it is. Because free memory is useless memory, it is used for disk cache or disk buffers, so that your system always uses as much memory as available.

ROBO_DONUT · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jan 2005 Posts: 144

ok, thanks. i was afraid there might be something wrong with my computer.

syg00 · Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2005 12:02 pm Post subject:

It has been a tuning "mantra" forever that the best I/O is no I/O.
Ditto for paging (includes swapping to disk).

Disk I/O is *SO* unbelievably slow it is to be avoided when-ever possible.
Linux is biased toward retaining referenced and cached pages in storage. SWAP is for when you have memory "over-committed".
In contrast to Windows.

Be happy - the memory management developers (generally) have it pretty right.