hi

I havea quick general and curiouse question about the memory usage statistics shown in the system monitor.

I'm using red hat 9 and I noticed that when I add the system monitor applet to my panel right after I first log in it says that 70 megs of memory is being used and 86% is free (when I mouse over th applet)..well thats great that means that it uses less memory thenmy windows xp

but when I open the sytem monitor from the panel start menus..the statistics are way different it says 130 megs are being used...so theres a huge difference..why is that? which one is more accurate?

thanx in advance,
Boomba

i have defintely noticed the same when it comes to the gui system monitors versus other outside programs

both the kde and gnome system info tools tell me that i have enormous amounts of memory used, while gkrellm tells me that only a small amount is used...

i don't know why this is happening; perhaps it reads two different files and has 2 different meanings?

Well, I guess it depends on your angle (as a
programmer) ... Linux will basically grab ALL
available memory (in terms of the kernels usage
I only have 5096Bytes free on a 512MB machine
with hardly anything running). You could, of course,
look at the sum of RAM that Applications chomp up
and consider THAT the memory usage. Or you could
look at buffers & caching as well ... the best thing
is probably to use free on the command line as well
as top and make sure you understand what both do :)


Cheers,
Tink

Gkrellm doesn't count buffers and cache, but there's an option to display dividers (krells) for them... same mem info you get from vmstat. GNOME sys mon counts them together like free does.

I just installed Fedora(red-hat) on my system, and when I look at mem. usage under system monitor it shows that Im useing 978MB ( holly shit) out of a possible 1024MB now I know that it really cant be useing that much but it seems weird that It would show up like that any suggestions.

Apparently you didn't read the above posts did you? They explain that this is normal.

thanx for your replies guys..I understand the memory usage moe now.....I have one more question..I find that as I use programs and close them the same amount of memory used to run them is not "freed" after I close them....there for the more programs I open and close the higher my ram usage goes when nothing is being run at all...is this a bad thing?..is this a memory leak?..and if this is normal, is there anything I can do to free that wasted ram?

thanx in advance,

Boomba,

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong....I've had this belief in my head for some time, but never found out whether or not it's fact....

It's not a memory leak, or wasted. This memory is free to use...it's simply not "freed" until it is needed.
An example of where this is useful: Assume you open a huge file, and then close it. Then you suddenly realize you forgot to edit a portion of the file, so you reopen it. This file (as far as I know) is already stored in RAM, provided you have enough available ram in which to store it, so it takes less time to load it.
If you don't reopen it, but instead begin a different task, that RAM will be freed, if needed for your new process.

that makes sense..thank you for your explanation