🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <68jh4k$142m@lamar.ColoState.EDU>,
David Keeler <heyjoe1@lamar.ColoState.EDU> wrote:
>
>Hello,

 Hey,

>It seems as if I am having problems with memory on my linux system at
>home.  I am running Red Hat Linux release 4.2 and Kernel 2.0.30.
>XOSView and the free command report the same observation.  When I
>run Netscape V3.2 with or without any cache setting and quit
>the application, the reported amount of free memory does not
>return to where it was before the application was started.
>When I do a hard boot and run "free" as the first command,
>I have about 40 Megs free.  After running Netscape for about
>a week (start and stopped about 20 times) free reports:
>
>total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
>Mem:         63168      49800      13368      15000      18660      17744
>-/+ buffers:            13396      49772
>Swap:        16588          0      16588
>
>As you can see, I have 64megs(edo) and a 16meg swap area.

 You should probably add some swap, although this isn't the answer to
every problem. In my P133 I have 64MB and something like 50MB in swap and
it runs ok, of course I don't run X on it so that helps.  Netscape runs
pretty good displaying to another machine. I haven't watched memory on
it lately, but both Netscape and X (even moreso) are known not to play
nicely with others when it comes to memory.

 X bleeds like a stuck pig and my theory about netscape is that it
taints memory so that it can't be used again without a reboot. :)


>Here's what's running currently:

[ps data deleted]

 One thing that will help out is to go through your startup level with
a chainsaw so that only what you need to have running is running. If
you've a stand-alone machine with only dialup, you can get rid of stuff
like the NFS servers and clients, snmpd, trim your virtual consoles
down to 2 or three, etc.. With 64MB, alot of this might seem trivial,
but you're using all of your swap space right now. The less useless
cruft you have running, the less misused memory you'll have.

>Really nothing other than the X window system and a few xterms.  This should
>not be taking up 40 megs of ram.

 True, but it does. :( I've seen X server processes run to over 200MB...

>  Eventually, all the memory gets taken up
>and the system locks up.  I recently upgraded from 32 to 64 megs of ram.

 Add some swap space. The rule-of-thumb of old is "swap space should be
double what you have in real memory." This is still a good idea if you can
sacrifice the disk space, otherwise, at least try to equal real memory
in swap. I've got some UltraSparc2 2300's at work (2x300MHz processors)
that have 768MB of RAM with 1.5GB of swap and they run pretty good. I've
had to add another 1.5GB of swap to one of them for some really nasty
runs, but the 2xRAM rule-of-thumb is pretty trustworthy.

>I don't seem to have any memory problems when I run Lose 95.  Other
>apps also seem to take up memory, and never free it.  I just ran Xview
>and it appears to take up about 2% of my ram, but never give it up.
>I installed the ram a few months ago and it is not the same brand as
>the older simms in my board.  I did populate the simm sockets in a way
>that is allowed (2x16 meg simms and 2 new 16meg simms).   All of the
>memory is correctly identified and scanned during bios and Linux
>boot-up:

 As long as the SIMM's are the same speed you should be fine. Really,
I'd try to add some swap space before I tried anything else. You might be
surprised. Also, cut the size of the caches down in netscape to about 3
or 5MB. This has helped out my SS10 running Solaris and netscape at work.


-- 
     Mike Loseke     |  It's pudding time, children!
   mike@verinet.com  |                     -- Primus