[UCLA-LUG] Where'd all my memory go???

[witten@torsion.org]

On Sun, Nov 28, 1999 at 11:19:37PM -0800, Leston Buell wrote:
> Hi, guys. I've been having a really wierd problem 
> today on my Pentium 166 RedHat 5.2 box. I noticed that things 
> we're going slow, and i figured the problem was Netscape. 
> (I'm in KDE.) Running "top", i saw that i still only had 
> a couple megs (if that ) of memory left. So i ended my X-session. 
> After that i still had only 7 megs (out of 32) of memory 
> left. So i rebooted. Even before i start up an X-session, 
> it's using up 16 megs of memory. Some else funny happened 

The thing about Linux memory management is that it specifically *tries* to
consume all your memory! If there is any memory free, then Linux sees that
as your hardware not being used to its full potential. So it will use up
some as that free memory as buffered or cached ram. As soon as an
application requires that bit of memory, its made available again. Try
typing "free" to see how many kilobytes are being used for temporary
buffers, cached memory, shared memory, etc.

> (both times) when i rebooted. Eventually one of my consoles
> (#1) displayed something like:
> 
>    hdc: not ready or tray open
> 
> Well, i checked and /dev/cdrom is linked to hdc. In /etc/fstab,
> /dev/cdrom is listed as noauto. So, why would it try to 
> mount the thang anyway? I've never had that happen to me 
> before.

Not sure about this.

> 
> This problem is driving me nuts. I'm writing you in Netscape 
> mail with a whopping 672 kbytes (!!!!!!) of memory left.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. If "free" lists a lot of buffered or
cached ram, chances are that your system is performing optimally.

> Sometimes Netscape crashes even before it starts up. 

Well, that might just be a Netscape problem.

> 
> The only thing i can think of that i've done which has changed 
> my system at all is that i finally set up my SoundBlaster sound 
> card properly with soundconfig (or however it's spellt).

That *shouldn't* cause these problems.

> 
> Any hints appreciated. Oh, is there some command that will let 
> me see how much memory each process is taking?

"top" has a column for "%MEM". Pressing uppercase "M" while in top will sort
the processes by their respective memory usages.

> 
> 
> -- 
> Leston Buell
> bulbul@ucla.edu
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> "Paradise is exactly like where you are right now,
> 	only much, MUCH better."
> 				-- Laurie Anderson
> 
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-- 
Dan Helfman
UCLA Linux Users Group: http://www.linux.ucla.edu
My GnuPG key: http://torsion.org/witten/public-key.txt