[Wolves] Progress report!!

[David Goodwin]

>
> Hi
>
> I used "free" on the command line to check on memory
> usage and about half of the 512MB is used uP???? and
> that was straight from booting up to the desktop with
> no applications activated. Which command or
> application can I use to check on which processes are
> taking the memory and how do I free up some more??
>

In terms of computers, the slowest thing is accessing data on a disk.
Because of this, Linux attempts to cache as much data you've read from the
disk as possible - so should you access the same file again, no disk reads
are required, and performance is stellar. Try running Open Office, or
Mozilla, once.... closing them down and then starting them up again -
you'll find the second time will be a *lot* quicker - this is because the
data is still held in memory, and all that was required as a bit of cpu
work.

The Linux kernel will manage your memory usage, so there is always some
available to load new programs into... so it's nothing to worry about.

In the off chance that you have a program whcih wishes to misbehave and
gobble all your memory up, you'll firstly notice that everything goes dog
slow, and the hard disk light stays on (kernel attempts to swap unused
memory out to disk to free up ram). If you wish to find out who the greedy
process is, the easiest way is to run "top" and press "M" when it's
displaying a list of processes. If you wish to kill one, press "k" and
then type in the process id (pid) when prompted. IF you wish to recreate
this for your own pleasure, download / get hold of netscape communicator
4.5 - 4.7 and open a relatively large page (perhaps
http://codepoets.co.uk/david/penguin.htm will do it).



Thanks
David.
-- 

http://codepoets.co.uk/david