[Tfug] Memory woes

[Stephen Hooper]

On 2/4/07, Christopher Robbins <robbinsc at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It's running 2.6.18, x86_64 version.  I'm leaning towards the install being
> borked.  I mean, running 'top',
> everything looks out of whack.  Even things that shouldn't be sucking down
> memory (non-leaking Firefox, ssh connections,
> etc) are killing huge amounts of free memory.  Running a media player and a
> torrent downloader has taken all but 10 mb of
> available system memory.  This isn't right at all.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.  If you observe those processes,
are they actually consuming that memory, or is it being allocated to
things like buffer-cache, etc?

If it is just the kernel occupying the memory, then it is right at all! :)

If by "thrashing" you mean that things are getting swapped out to disk
too frequently then obviously there is something wrong with your
virtual memory configuration:  you could try to load a different I/O
scheduler, and also spend some time figuring out what is causing
things to have to be flushed to disk so often...

What does  vmstat look like for a nice sized run?