Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3394 mails)

[warrl@xxxxxxxxx (Warrl)]

On Thu, 23 Mar 2000, Stuart Hall wrote:

> I have a minimum install, plus a little networking, installed on my
> 486-33 box w/ 16 meg ram.  However, when doing a "top" last night, I
> see that almost 15 meg of ram is already being used by other processes
> - one of which is sendmail.

If you don't intend to be using this box as a mailserver, then you
can get rid of sendmail.  Don't just kill it, uninstall it.

Same sort of thing with other services you don't want.

And, 16 meg *is* fairly tight.  Particularly if you try to run X.

However, you don't necessarily have a problem.  You might, or you
might not.

There are several ways of seeing your memory usage.  The most popular
two are:

free: shows memory and swapfile occupied for various purposes
top: 4th/5th lines sames as free

However, for seeing if you have a memory problem, the command you
want is

vmstat

and I'll recommend the appropriate man page for details on all
fields.  But I will direct you to two fields.  Toward the middle of
the line, the top title is "swap" and under it are two subtitles:
"si" and "so".  These are the current activity (not allocation,
activity) level on the swapfile, measured in kilobytes per second,
one for input and one for output.

You really really like low numbers in these two fields, particularly
in si.  Each time si is incremented, it means that - from your
application's point of view - time froze for several hundred clock
cycles, while it had work it COULD have been doing for you.

If si is high, not only do your processes spend a lot of time
waiting, so do you.


-- 
To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxx
For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@xxxxxxxx             
Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/