X is greedy

[Siplus]

i have RH8 (newly installed) running GNOME. i have an athlon 1.1, 384mb ram, and nvidia geforce4, so i don't think it's a hardware problem, but X seems to run very slow. when i run the system monitors, i sometimes see it taking upto 200mb of ram, and w/ all of the other things i have running, i usually only have about 5mb of ram not being used. why does linux use as much memory as it can? i don't remember haveing a problem w/ memory management in windows (i realize that my ram problem is mine, i just don't know how to limit linux's usage)

also, i have all the system managers running, but i never see my swap partition being used. is this only for system startup, or when you run out of ram, or what?

thanks

[mobrien_12]

This is a common misinterpretation.  Your memory indicator shows the total amount of RAM which is allocated.  A large portion of this is for disk caching which greatly speeds up your machine.  This ram is reallocated when it is needed for other things.

[jtpenrod]

quote:i have RH8 (newly installed) running GNOME. i have an athlon 1.1, 384mb ram, and nvidia geforce4, so i don't think it's a hardware problem, but X seems to run very slow. when i run the system monitors, i sometimes see it taking upto 200mb of ram, and w/ all of the other things i have running, i usually only have about 5mb of ram not being used. why does linux use as much memory as it can? i don't remember haveing a problem w/ memory management in windows (i realize that my ram problem is mine, i just don't know how to limit linux's usage)

This is a very common mis-perception for those coming to Linux from Winderz. Linux will keep as much in memory as possible in order to minimize the number of times it has to hit the HD. (This goes back to the early days of UNIX when neither computers nor HDs were all that fast. This helps to speed up the system.) Here's a fer-instance: if you copy something to a diskette, the actual write won't occur right away as it does with Win. It may not happen for several minutes, or, perhaps not until you unmount the floppy. (That's also why it's necessary to pay attention to "disk active" LED on the floppy drive so you don't remove it while a disk write is in progress.)

Of course, this makes Linux look like a terrible memory hog when it really isn't. I had Mandrake, running KDE, on a Dell OptiPlex GSa with 32MB of RAM. Even though 'Drake suggested a minimum of 64MB, it ran just fine, except that I couldn't have more than four apps going at once. So with just half the suggested minimum of RAM, and 64MB of swap, I could still run Linux. So don't take that RAM useage data too seriously. It's not really using that much memory, and if it needs more, it'll just write what it's been saving to the HD.
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