Ravi Malghan wrote: > Hi: I have installed Fedora 6 on a laptop with 756MB > RAM. With no application started when the machine > boots up, the top is saying that, 601308K is being > used. > > Mem: 774356k total, 601308k used, 173048k free, > 19348k buffers > > Is this normal? or is this not really what it means. I > read some postings that the memory usage shown here is > what is allocated for the processes and not how much > is being used. It's normal -- you need to look at the "cached" figure as well, which is memory used to keep a copy of data on the hard drive that the system has accessed recently. If the system needs to read it again, it can get it out of cache, which is much faster than reading it from disk. Memory used for caching is being used productively, while free memory isn't, so the system tries to use nearly all memory for caching if it hasn't got a better use for it. James. -- E-mail: james@ | Words fail me. Thank goodness I can make gestures. aprilcottage.co.uk | -- Mark Hughes
