Re: no memory

["Adam Williams" <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>Unless you are consuming swap space the system is operating normally,  UNIX
>>type systems typically have little or no free memory as free memory is wasted
>>memory.  It is used very aggresively for caching and buffering,  as anything
>>memory is "more available" than something on disk.  You are out of memory
only
>>if you are swapping,  you can monitor that by installing and running a
utility
>>such as procinfo.  I have 256Mb of memory and after only about a half hours
>>work there is only a few megabytes "free".  To determine the source of the
>>sluggish performance requires a bit more investigation.  Your not using
kernel
> 2.2.11 are you? (It DOES have a memory leak).
>
>Interesting observation, I have only 48megs of RAM, I'm running all the common
>internet services except news have FVWM2 and Netscape open and I have over
4Megs
>sitting (they also serve who stand and wait). I realize that I'm not
>crankin' up the hits on those services, but just having them running, from
>your explanation it sounds like I should be floating a lot less
>megs than that. I do have 16 megs of swap, but like the guy says that ain't
>sh**.
> Any explanation for this
> (apparently) better than average scenario. Oh yeah I'm running 2.2.12.

Sounds about right.  I checked and have about 6Mb free.  Depending on various
factors the kernel tries to determine how much to keep truly free,  so that if
and app starts requesting memory it can assign it to that application right
away,  but there is always a trade off of performance now vs. bieng ready for a
load spike.  I don't know on Linux what exactly that formula is,  but on AIX it
takes into account the current load average, amount of physical memory, and the
amount of physical memory consumed by applications, and the average number of
pages acquired/released in a given perion of time (computed with yet another
formula).