Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sun, 16 Jun 1996 16:59:16 +0100 (BST) | From | Bryn Paul Arnold Jones <> | Subject | Re: SCSI Woes |
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On Fri, 14 Jun 1996, Scott T. Miller wrote: [...] > Also, is 7.5M big for an uncompressed, running kernel? When I first > login as root, before I fire up X or anything else, free tells me that > over 7M are being used. I only have 16M total. Is this excessive? >
Yes, masive, considering that your uncompressed kernel can't be that big (look at the size of /usr/src/linux/vmlinux, if you compiled it your self, mine is 641kb, but only has ext2fs, ide disks, and compiled in only drivers, everything else is modules ;).
All the rest of the memory used is being used by running programs, and disk caches/buffers (up to 0 free memory, rember free memory is waisted memory), everything that was run to start your box will be in memory until you've filled it up, after that, up to date buffers are simply droped (a couple of pages at a time as and when the need arrises).
The only thing that's actually swaped to disk is that which can't be gotten back (ie data), everything else can be recovered from disk is just droped, eg why swap disk buffers to disk ?, or why swap a program to disk, when you can just demand load it back from the disk ?
> Thanks, > Scott Miller > stmiller@crosslink.net > Bryn -- PGP key pass phrase forgotten, \ Overload -- core meltdown sequence again :( | initiated. / This space is intentionally left | blank, apart from this text ;-) \____________________________________
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