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