Re: GNOME has a major memory hole somewhere.

[Harry Henry Gebel <hgebel inet net>]

William R Pentney wrote:
> There's probably more than that, too. There's absolutely no reason I
> can think of why GNOME and IceWM should take up 95% of my system memory
> when nothing else is open. (I should also note that when I run GNOME
> with Enlightenment, about 95% of the memory is also used; isn't
> Enlightenment supposed to carry a significantly heavier load than
> IceWM?) Any suggestions/comments?

What are you using to check memory? Alot of tools display calculate free
memory after buffers and cache. Type 'free' at the command line and you
should get a display like this:

        total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:    63232      61612       1620      27264       1308      19032
-/+ buffers/cache: 41272      21960

notice that if you don't take cache and buffer into consideration it
appears that I am using 97.4% of my memory but actually I am only using
65.3% of my memory. This is with gnome, enlightenment, setiathome,
emacs, gnome-terminal, gqmpeg, and Netscape loaded (although Netscape
was just loaded, once it's been open for a short while it'll use up all
that memory for real and start eating into swap also.)

Any time you have memory that's not being used Linux automagically uses
it to cache the hard drive, but this cache is given up as soon as a
program needs it so it can for most purposes be counted as still being
available. Once you close a program the new memory that is available can
be quickly used for more cache or to  swap things back into memory from
the swap partition, so it may not appear that the memory became
available, but if you look at all the numbers you will see that it
actually did. If any memory stayed permanently allocated even after you
closed the program that would be a bug in the kernel not in the program.