Before I start the question, let me say I've been lurking on the list
for a while and just took the plunge to install xfs on my laptop.
Wow. You guys have done an excellent job.
I was playing around with the system, creating directories with lots
of dummy files (~100000), deleting them, selectively deleting files,
etc., and I noticed that my memory usage was way high and not
dropping. I puzzled over it for a while, trying to get a handle on
what situations cause memory usage to climb, and noticed the following
anomoly:
itp@flux:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 255764 252080 3684 0 0 69020
-/+ buffers/cache: 183060 72704
Swap: 68032 0 68032
I was somewhat surprised to see shared and buffers both 0. Playing
around with it some more, it seems like much of the memory in use is
acting like it should be in buffers, or shared, but is getting
reported as used instead.
If I start something memory intensive and then quit, I find that the
used memory drops back down significantly, indicating to me that some
of the memory previously in use before starting the program has been
flushed, which sounds more like memory used as buffers.
Is this behaviour to be expected? It appears to be a cosmetic problem
only, as memory usage tools make things look dire, when in fact my
system will continue to run normally.
--
Ian Peters "...it is 5 am and the sun has charred the other
itp@xxxxxxx side of the earth and come back to us and painted
itp@xxxxxxxxxx the smoke over our heads an imperial violet..."
|