XFree & Memory Usage

[pennedinil]

Hello all,

Just installed a base system with X. I'm look at total memory usage #s and I feel they're too high.

I have 1 GB RAM and 512 MB swap on my system. In Gnome system monitor, after Gnome's been running for about 6 hours, XFree86 shows as using 105 MB memory & 110 MB VM. Mozilla is showing up as running 6 threads, each at a 110 MB apiece (44 MB memory + 64 MB VM, 2 windows though). And in all, I'm seeing total memory usage averaging about 900 MB on my machine.

Is this normal? I thought Linux was capable of running on "lean" machines. I can't see that happening with these numbers. Perhaps I just don't understand memory management under Linux? BTW I'm running Linux 2.4.21-rc1-ac3 compiled from source, flags set for optimizing speed, bloat kept to a minimum. I believe AC kernels have pretty good memory management routines.

Sonce I don't know if this is the norm or if I'm doing something wrong, I thought I'd ask...

Dini

On top of all this, my Radeon 7000 is giving me ~280 FPS, but that's better left for another day.

[nemhain]

Linux uses most free memory to cache. There is no point in having more memory if it isn't beeing used? :)
And threads share memory so it's 110 MB for them together, not apiece.

[pennedinil]

Thanks for the update. It seems you're right. gnome-system-monitor doesn't seem to be reporting mem usage correctly. For that I listed /proc/meminfo to get more accurate details. Most of the usage is freom cached memory.

DP