High memory usage, can anyone help?

[nero642]

Hello all first post so i'll try and get the point across as best i can.
I installed the latest version of linux mint kde yesterday i have been dabbling with linux the past few weeks and can sort of get around it.
My problem is high ram usage, the system after its turned on and with a bit of web browsing uses roughly 360MB this i thought wasnt too bad as other versions of linux i tried were using this, the problem comes when i try to do anything else, i extracted a tv show which was rar'd this only took a minute to do but my ram usage shot up from the usual to using 3400MB and stayed there the process table shows i have 3546 MB installed, its really 4 gig but i can live with that. I rebooted the system and then transferred the tv show onto a usb stick, this sent the ram used to over a gig, it has since dropped back down to 833MB but all im doing is using the web browser.
I cant really understand the process table but it says i have 140 process's running?? can anyone help me lower the memory used
Thanx.

[miket]

Hi !

Hello all first post so i'll try and get the point across as best i can.
I installed the latest version of linux mint kde yesterday i have been dabbling with linux the past few weeks and can sort of get around it.
My problem is high ram usage, the system after its turned on and with a bit of web browsing uses roughly 360MB this i thought wasnt too bad as other versions of linux i tried were using this, the problem comes when i try to do anything else, i extracted a tv show which was rar'd this only took a minute to do but my ram usage shot up from the usual to using 3400MB and stayed there the process table shows i have 3546 MB installed, its really 4 gig but i can live with that. I rebooted the system and then transferred the tv show onto a usb stick, this sent the ram used to over a gig, it has since dropped back down to 833MB but all im doing is using the web browser.
I cant really understand the process table but it says i have 140 process's running?? can anyone help me lower the memory used
Thanx.

You're worrying unnecessarily !
What is happening here is file caching, Linux will cache the file in memory so that it can be read quicker with less disk I/Os ...
if you then need more memory to run another application it will automatically release some of the memory from disk cache and make it
available for the application.

Linux memory management isn't like windows, it is far more intelligent, so don't let it worry you, just use the machine and enjoy it

If you want to see what is going on, open a terminal and type

Code: Select all

top

This will start a tool which will give you a view of what is going on.
Press S1 to get updates every second (Or s2, s3 etc etc) and press 1 to see the load on each processor separately.

Mike.

[nero642]

Thankyou for the reply.
Thats what i thought was happening but just wanted it confirmed. I reinstalled the kde version tonight, not because of what i thought was high ram usage it was because after reading the install notes on this forum i hadnt installed mint right, i let it do its own thing and ended up with 10gig swap space. I followed the instructions but it said for my system with 4 gig of ram i should make a swap of no more than 256 KB at the most, i couldnt get a figure in KB so set the swap at 256 MB. Is this ok? sorry for the stupid questions and thanks for all the hard work thats went into mint.

[xnostradamusx]

Thankyou for the reply.
Thats what i thought was happening but just wanted it confirmed. I reinstalled the kde version tonight, not because of what i thought was high ram usage it was because after reading the install notes on this forum i hadnt installed mint right, i let it do its own thing and ended up with 10gig swap space. I followed the instructions but it said for my system with 4 gig of ram i should make a swap of no more than 256 KB at the most, i couldnt get a figure in KB so set the swap at 256 MB. Is this ok? sorry for the stupid questions and thanks for all the hard work thats went into mint.

the amount of swap you need is multiplied by your total ram by 1.5 the total of that is what you need to put on swap

lets say i got 1gb now multiplied by 1.5 so well put 1500 mb in swap

good luck

[nero642]

Hi Thanks for the reply.
I followed this

If you have 4 Gig. of ram on a 32 bit system like Mint, make a very small swap partition anyway, as the kernel expects to have a swap partition available. Not having a swap partition slows the kernel down in certain situations. For this purpose, there is no need for the swap partition to be over 256 KB at most.

EDIT: when i look in one memory monitor its sitting at 1848MB however when i look in another monitor it shows the usage as 371MB

[Husse]

I bumped into this topic "by mistake"

EDIT: when i look in one memory monitor its sitting at 1848MB however when i look in another monitor it shows the usage as 371MB

This (probably) means that you have 1477 MB cached

[miket]

It's always best to make your swap 2 x the size of RAM.

The reason being that you can then swap the entire contents of RAM to disk and then have enough space for the system to function in RAM with enough
space for it to swap again if need be. (Not that it should ever get to point!)

So, if you have 1GB RAM make your swap 2GB.

Mike.

Thankyou for the reply.
Thats what i thought was happening but just wanted it confirmed. I reinstalled the kde version tonight, not because of what i thought was high ram usage it was because after reading the install notes on this forum i hadnt installed mint right, i let it do its own thing and ended up with 10gig swap space. I followed the instructions but it said for my system with 4 gig of ram i should make a swap of no more than 256 KB at the most, i couldnt get a figure in KB so set the swap at 256 MB. Is this ok? sorry for the stupid questions and thanks for all the hard work thats went into mint.

the amount of swap you need is multiplied by your total ram by 1.5 the total of that is what you need to put on swap

lets say i got 1gb now multiplied by 1.5 so well put 1500 mb in swap

good luck