On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, Aton wrote:
> Hello.
>
> I typically find that no matter how much memory I throw at a Linux box,
> that the system RAM will usually only have 7-10M (meg) free, even with
> configurations of 1 GIG of RAM. I know that the filesystem uses a vast
> amount of this RAM as cache and buffers, but how do I set this so that it
> uses UP TO a certian amount. Some non-vital componets get swapped to disk
> (viewable via TOP), and I'd prefer that if I had 1 GIG of RAM in a system,
> and the only thing running is samba, that 500M be FREE! =)
>
Look at your "free" display:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 255088 247636 7452 0 16744 105216
-/+ buffers/cache: 125676 129412
Swap: 1052248 12456 1039792
The second line here is your "real" used and free numbers.
You'll see that on my system about half of my RAM is really
in use even though the first line indicates only ~7M unused.
The rest of the usage is system cache and buffers, and believe
me, if your system is running as a fileserver you want those
buffers to be there for performance reasons.
--
Daniel Taylor
dante at plethora.net