Re: [SLUG] Memtest86

From: Norbert Cartagena (niccademous@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Nov 06 2001 - 14:19:16 EST


> * a note: the reason I'm running memtest:
> A few weeks ago, I added 64M of EDO RAM to total
> 128. Sometimes
> gkrellm and top reported that only ~30M were being
> used; other times
> they would report that ~80+M were being used, even
> though I was running
> the same processes.... and when I quit X, top would
> report that only
> 20M were free! The changes in reporting occurred
> whenever I shutdown &
> restarted the next day. The programs I was
> running were: bash, X,
> IceWM. Lately, all I run is ratpoison, which
> doesn't even take up a
> meg of memory, and gkrellm reports that 50M are free
> (top reports that
> only 20M are free!!! >:()
> --Even if no one knows why this would be happening,
> can anyone tell me
> what the typical load on memory is when they are
> running nothing** but
> BASH? Or how about X/window manager?

Actually what you're seeing is pretty normal. Here's a
short explanation about what's very possibly going on
(I don't know MUCH about this, but I'm sure someone
can expand upon this). The way the kernel works when
it comes to memory is that whenever you run a process
and then stop running the process, the ammount of
memory that was being used by that process stays in
the memory, all blocked off. Now, the kernel doesn't
look to really clean it until you need it again, at
which point it just grabs the memory that is no longer
being used (this is why you wont get "out of memory"
error in Linux when some silly programmer doesn't
notice the fact that they forgot to free up the memory
they were using in their program. I swear, some of
these programmers (*AHEM* M$) must be running off of
machines with like 4gigs of RAM so that they never
notice these stupid programming errors... but that's
way out there). Programs that look for how much memory
is free just look to see what's occupied, not
necessarily what's being used at the moment by
anything. In short, you computer should be fine.

I think it was Ed Centanni about a year ago that first
said something about that sort of thing happening and
then explained to us how the Kernel worked in that
sense. Maybe he can expand on it. Ed?

(Y.a.)P.S.
X takes a good ammount of memory, as do some of the
other background processes that you were running (the
kernel itself, I believe only uses 4megs of RAM, but
maybe that's way off). Is this a server of any sort?
You mentioned you were running Sendmail. Do you need
to be? Just wondering.

Hope this helps,

Gnorb

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    . . I'll be your server this evening.
    /V\
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