On Mon, 26 Oct 1998, Vincent Rosso wrote: > > Yep, I still have more questions. Ugh. But, things are shapping up at > least. > > 1. Netscape Messenger takes a /very/ long time to load. Navigator loads
No idea about this one. Don't use messenger? > 2. I have 32 megs of RAM, but when I call free, it says that I have 30. > Where'd my last two go??? Actually, why don't I just show you: > > total used free shared > buffers cached > Mem: 30264 29080 1184 17572 172 > 12296 > -/+ buffers/cache: 16612 13652 > Swap: 64256 12952 51304 > > Also, should the system be taking up so much? Right after I reboot, it's > already taking up almost all of the real RAM. I'm going to upgrade > anyway, but I was wondering if this was normal? Right, I'm going out on a limb here and I really don't know what I'm talking about, so keep that in mind. But: I believe Linux caches a lot of things into memory (including disk read/writes). This improves system performance. Once you load other programs up, Linux relinquishes it's cache to make room for them. Incidentally, this cacheing behaviour is why you should always umount a removeable disk before removing it (unless you use mtools) because the system may still have a lot of stuff you've "written" to it in memory cache and hasn't got around to putting it on the physical medium yet. I have 32 Mb memory and 32 of swap, and I've just had my first "out of memory" error. I was running Netscape, Xemacs, and The Gimp (all of which had multiple windows open) and I tried to compile a Java program. Buy more by all means, but 32 Mb is more than adequate to run linux plus tons of programs. Andrew Tarr "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate"
