[Lincs] hello from a new member

[Andy Davidson]

On 23 Jun 2004, at 19:14, Dave Rice wrote:

> I guess you are referring to memory when you show
> those figures.  They seem quite normal, as most of
> your memory is 'cached' for future use by applications
> you havent started yet  ;)   don't worry its fairly
> normal and actually speeds up your system.

Sort of. :-)  The cached stuff is all manner of 'stuff' which has been 
read from or deposited to the disk - RAM is quick to dump data to and 
pull data from, but disks are relatively slow.

The theory is that if the data was used or created recently, it could 
be needed again quite soon.  So Linux stores the data in RAM as well as 
on the disk (and sometimes doesn't write the data onto the disk until 
the system is idle - that's what the bdflush process you might have 
seen does, in case it's caught your interest before.)

You can see how much is being used for this disk buffer purpose with 
the 'free' command :

              total       used       free     shared    buffers     
cached
Mem:         58924      51120       7804          0       2952      
11808
-/+ buffers/cache:      36360      22564
Swap:       262136      60960     201176


the top line implies that only about 7MB is free in this computer, but 
in reality, there's actually about 22MB free - the middle line tells 
you how much memory is being used/is free taking the effect of the disk 
buffers out.


-- 
Regards, Andy Davidson
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