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Old 05-31-2001, 06:48 PM   #1
doodah
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i appear to be having some kind of memory usage problem... a big one... i have been moitoring my system with free recently and right now(after only 20 hours of uptime) i have about 251 of my 256 megs used... when my system boots i have about 70 megs used.. and over time it just adds up... i have almost nothing running except apache, mysql, and the normal stuff...any suggestions? if needed ill post the output of $ps -ax..
 
Old 05-31-2001, 10:37 PM   #2
notsoevil
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Wink

How about the output of 'top' sorted by memory usage (capital 'M')?

That should give you a clue about which process is using the largest percentage of your memory.
 
Old 06-01-2001, 12:56 AM   #3
doodah
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ok i did a 'top' and then used 'M' to get the sort.. X and all its components are usng about 30% of my mem, enlightenment, netscape and X... after those there is only small ones like 1.5, 1.4, 1.0, 0.9... a question when daemons are running, how many instances of each should show up on 'top'... cuz i have like 10 httpd's and 5 mysqld, each httpd is like .9% and each mysqld is .8%... i have no clue.. i did build 'mm' in with apache... and this problem possibly started then, im not quite sure... any help is 'preciated..
------
new..
i used 'gtop' in x and it has a nice gui for top.. i added up all the processes that it had listed, and they only came out to like 90M... why is it a 'free' and 'top' are both showing that i have 255M used... oh yeh i tried to kill a couple httpd's and they came back, so i think they is a number of thoses always there..

[Edited by doodah on 06-01-2001 at 02:07 AM]
 
Old 06-01-2001, 02:36 AM   #4
ugge
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This seems absolutely normal.
Since linux use the memory quite different from windows you will only have a few meg memory free.
This is because linux use as much of the memory as possible for disk cache and buffers, and as soon as you need more memmory linux write the diskbuffers to disk freeing memory for your application. This speed up the use of disk and cache as frequently used files are in memmory instead of on the disk. This is the reason why you need to shut down linux proberly since the data in memory needs to be written to disk.
 
Old 06-01-2001, 07:30 AM   #5
doodah
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Quote:
This seems absolutely normal.
i thought that for a second.. however this is whats happening...

1. at boot, my box is using about 70M total memory as shown by $ free

2. after every command, i watch the mem usage go up by 1-10 megs... even just using $ free, adds several megs everytime i run $ free

3. after only 2 hrs of uptime my HD starts churning and i have about 99% of my RAM used and about 1/5 of my 300M of swap space used

does this still sound normal?
 
Old 06-01-2001, 06:26 PM   #6
jharris
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Cool

Check out this previous thread

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...?threadid=2576

Jamie...
 
Old 06-01-2001, 08:58 PM   #7
doodah
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whew!... cool, thanks Jamie...
Quote:
Since linux use the memory quite different from windows you will only have a few meg memory free. This is because linux use as much of the memory as possible for disk cache and buffers, and as soon as you need more memmory linux write the diskbuffers to disk freeing memory for your application. This speed up the use of disk and cache as frequently used files are in memmory instead of on the disk.
ugge,
i shouldve read your post a little closer! i was trippn cause of seeing $free and not understanding quite what it was saying.. thanks for the help...

_peace

 
  


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