-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday, 2009-03-18 at 04:40 -0500, David C. Rankin wrote:

Kai Ponte wrote:

...

I had to laugh. I was working just now and noticed the amount of tasks that I had running.

http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/2009/20090317_desktop.jpg

Just try this in Wintendo!

Good chuckle... I'll see you and raise you one (no staging involved). When I read your email I have 13 apps open where the konsole window had 8 sessions running in it for a total of 20. I agree -- Just try this in Wintendo.

I have 35. One of them is gnome-terminal with 17 tabs. All scattered over 9 "workspaces", on a 15" display >:-P Of course, I'm counting each mozilla window as an app - after all, "they" are using a whooping 362 megabytes! (of my 1GiB ram) - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAknBFO8ACgkQtTMYHG2NR9WHJACfctH1HLKrHEoYjJ51gMk0PQkR cvAAnjhsWMww24f7nhyIspmok0dO7Vfl =g4k/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Wednesday 18 March 2009 12:29:02 pm John E. Perry wrote:

PS: ksensors says I have only 796M of my 2G ram in use, and 676M of my 2G swap in use.  Why should any swap be in use?

What 'free' tells? -- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

In <49C12F5E.7040306@cox.net>, John E. Perry wrote:

PS: ksensors says I have only 796M of my 2G ram in use, and 676M of my 2G swap in use. Why should any swap be in use?

Memory pressure at some point may have caused things to swap out. It's extra work to remove something from swap before absolutely necessary, so once you've gone into swap you'll have some in use for the remainder of the boot, probably. Even if a page in swap is needed, it isn't removed from swap as soon as it is in RAM. Instead, the kernel waits until the RAM page is written to before invalidating the swap page. This way, if memory pressure increase again, no actual writes to swap have to occur to swap that page out. For this reason, the pages containing nothing but configuration data for long- running processes will generally stay in swap until that process dies once they are swapped out. I *think* it is possible for requests to allocate buffer/cache memory (file system operations) to cause pages to swap out, but that's rather rare if it can happen at all. If it truly bothers you to have stuff in swap, you can use a quick swapoff/swapon to force the swap to be expired. (Linux is very smart about memory management. If you are using swap, there's probably a good reason.) -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday, 2009-03-18 at 13:29 -0400, John E. Perry wrote:

Hm. I routinely keep half a dozen applications open on my xp pro boxes with no bad effects. And I limit that because the twits at Microsoft aren't sophisticated enough to give us multiple desktops; it's just too much trouble to find more apps on a single desktop. So I really can't say anything more about xp's abilities.

Yes, I also open a lot of apps in windows, too, but it is a nuisance to have them all on the same desktop. The limit is the human rather than resources (if it doesn't crash).

I have only 6 desktops configured on my opensuse 11.0 laptop, which allows me to keep (at the moment only) 20 instances of 8 applications open. Usually it's more, but I rebooted a few days ago and haven't reopened all my OOo documents yet.

Try hybernting: I power off the computer, and when I come back all apps are opened in place.

PS: ksensors says I have only 796M of my 2G ram in use, and 676M of my 2G swap in use. Why should any swap be in use?

Contrary to what many think, having swap in use when there is free memory is a good thing. Why? Because that way you have more memory free. Try this: note how much memory is in use (for example, from the top of "top"). Then hibernate (suspend to disk), and restore: you will see that the swap used increases. It means that many things that were in memory are not needed really, so they remain in swap. The end result is that you have more free memory. In your case, it may be that at some point the system needed a lot of memory. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAknBeIMACgkQtTMYHG2NR9XpUwCdGL/7NovDKQVCnEI+rfh+xCz2 RB0An2QA4krrTFcaXXxytu5RogpOuz1M =kDVn -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Thanks, Boyd, Dave, Carlos, and Rajko, David C. Rankin wrote:

Regardless, you should see your full 2G, and if not, it might be worth a trip through the bios to see if there is any way to account for the lost memory. If not, then I would reseat the dimms, check again, the run memtest to see if I could uncover any other problems.

As I showed Rajko, I do have the full 2G available -- ksensors shows a very abbreviated list in its "meters". ------ Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:

... Memory pressure at some point may have caused things to swap out. It's extra work to remove something from swap before absolutely necessary, so once you've gone into swap you'll have some in use for the remainder of the boot, probably.

Of course! I should have realized this myself.

...

If it truly bothers you to have stuff in swap, you can use a quick swapoff/swapon to force the swap to be expired.

(Linux is very smart about memory management. If you are using swap, there's probably a good reason.)

Indeed, it was no bother; I was simply curious. It's been decades since my CS courses covered swapping, and I'd forgotten much of it. I likely got my education, too, before much of swapping technology was developed (in the early '70's, Structured Programming was just becoming The Big Thing, and Object Oriented Programming was a spark in the back of some genius's brain :-). ------------- Carlos, maybe someday I'll try the experiments you suggested, but life is short, and I have a lot to do besides dig deeply into the bowels of linux and its performance :-). I am saving your suggestions for a possible future. ------------ BTW, I despise Microsoft's practices as much as anyone, but I feel we should despise them for real practices and performance -- not stuff we dream up or hear about or would like to accuse them of. That was the point of my original message. jp -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org