Jeremy Figgins wrote:
I've seen a lot of "top" output thrown around on this topic and a bunch of people have touched on this issue, but let me ask this question:
I'm sitting right now in front of my 1gig machine. I have my normal set of apps open: firefox, thunderbird, konsole, etc. How can I tell if I would benefit from additional RAM? What command and what output do I need to pay attention to?
Well, I'm going be contrary and say that even if you don't hit swap, you might need more RAM. As mentioned, some programs (like GIMP) use their own temporary disk space if there isn't enough RAM. And even if you aren't using swap, you might be cutting back too much on disk buffers. You want to see how much RAM your apps are using. There's a bunch of ways to do this: 1] htop - a much better top, this displays a line for memory usage: Mem[|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||########*********** 1067/3042MB] The number at the right is what you are really interested in. This is how much memory is being used by apps and how much free memory. 2] The KDE memory module, which you can run from the command line with the command 'kcmshell memory'. This again shows you how much application data you are using. 3] I like Conky as a resource monitor. Be sure to set the "no_buffers" value to be false, so it doesn't include the fungible Disk Cache. This will keep you posted on the memory usage. But still, the number is a moving target. -- Jonathan Arnold (mailto:jdarnold@buddydog.org) Linux Brain Dump - Linux Notes, HOWTOs and Tutorials: http://www.linuxbraindump.org Daemon Dancing in the Dark, an Open OS weblog: http://freebsd.amazingdev.com/blog/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org