[ILUG] kde and memory

[Niall O Broin]

On 30 Aug 2004, at 12:02, Kevin Philp wrote:

> The output from top now says:
>
> mem 	515636k
> used		248536k
> free		267100k
> buff		7412k
> swap		811240k
> used		0k
> cached	154144k
>
> It seems the machine was just about using all of the original 256k. 
> The above
> results were with OpenOffice loaded but no documents so we could 
> easily have
> slipped into needing swap.

Yes, and as the box hasn't been up long you probably haven't consumed 
memory with a bunch of other little things too.

Note that from the output of top above, the box has 267M free, but it 
also has ~160M used for buffers and cache. If you still had only 256M 
of memory, you'd be nearly out of free RAM, all else being equal. But 
that 160M could be used for running programs. However, the 2.4 kernel 
will start to use swap before it will reclaim those pages, and this 
will lead to a perceived slowness. This behaviour AIUI can be 
controlled in 2.6 with the 'swappiness' parameters via /proc.

Given the price of RAM now, 512M isn't a huge amount to have in a 
desktop machine. I wonder how XP with Office XP, IE and Outlook behaves 
with 256M of RAM? I don't have such a machine available to test, and I 
don't really care, but I'm curious.

> I was also wondering if nfs was an issue. We export all the users home
> directories from a central server over a 100mb ethernet. I keep 
> OpenOffice
> installed locally because of the size.

Well, a kernel using NFS will use a little more memory than one 
without, but I doubt it's a whole lot.



Niall