[Gllug] back on the linux front

[John Winters]

Nix wrote:
> On 18 Apr 2007, John Winters verbalised:
>> I admit I'm typing this on a machine with 1G of RAM, but of that 
>> currently 211256k is unused and 560564k is cache, meaning that less than 
>>   280M is seriously in use.
> 
> Given the sorts of things that the page cache is used for, I'd not call
> page cache pages necessarily unused.
> 
> You should probably at least subtract the Mapped figure in /proc/meminfo
> from the Cached figure, to try to account for the fact that mapped text
> pages from executables will be run directly from the page cache. (Of
> course that accounting is also somewhat inaccurate, but it's better than
> just assuming the page cache pages are unused.)

I don't think I suggested that cache was the same as unused.  However, 
although using memory for cache speeds the system up, the lack of such 
memory certainly won't make it thrash in the way described.

For the record, the "Mapped" figure is currently 53M, so my figures are 
pretty accurate.

512M is a generous amount of RAM for a modern Linux desktop.  256M is 
OK, but will swap a bit.

John
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