On Thursday 17 October 2002 23.30, Ole Kofoed Hansen wrote:
On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Anders Johansson wrote:
hm. Good question. I thought I knew how to read the numbers in "free" and "ps", but apparently I don't. kmail has a virtual size of 35 MB of which about 20 is resident, and the kdeinit processes take up some number of MB too (RSS) but according to "free" the available memory only drops by about 13MB when I start it.
[...snip...]
Something just doesn't add up here.
I think all those kdeinit processes have some memory shared. This might be shown as used by each process, but because it is actually only used once, it will only be deducted once in the output from free.
The output from top and ps is simply not meant to be added up, because that often gives wrong results.
OK, but even just the kmail process had 20 megs as Resident Set Size, and 35 MB as Virtual size. Before I started kmail - and I'm running blackbox here, before I started kmail there were no kde processes running at all - I had 13 MB more memory free than after. So 20MB RSS results in 13 MB less free memory? I don't get it. Anders