memory mgmt

[Chakravarthi]

Hi all,

When i use to have 256MB memory in my machine with complete load just 3MB used to be free and the machine performance is very slow, recently i upgraded the memory to 512, still with complete load just 3mb is free, what i observe is now applications has memory to use, performance wise little improvement is there,,

is there any procedure to check why applications are taking so much of memory, and is there any memory leak, can i believe the output of top, is there any other command which gives me correct information,

please point me to good memory management documents

thanks
chakri

[Vitaly Karasik_1 · Accepted solution]

Chakri,

you can check

http://linux-mm.org/docs.shtml

http://kernelnewbies.org/


Understanding the Linux Kernel, 2nd Edition book

http://www.csn.ul.ie/~mel/projects/vm/guide/html/understand/

Vitaly.

[Sergejs Svitnevs]

Try to to measure the memory usage of processes in Linux with:

# top -bn 1

Regards,
Sergejs

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

3MB of free memory isn't a problem - see how linux memory management/virtual memory works (in short, kernel uses *all RAM* in order to save something, but return memory in "free pool" when some program asks for it)