If you really wish to try doing some fine-tuning actions to reclaim as much memory as possible, here are a few that you may wish to consider :
1. Multiple swap partitions. Create and activate two or more 512MB swap partitions on each drive in your system, make sure that these are set correctly in your /etc/fstab file, and set these multiple swap partitions at equivalent high-priorities. See
http://kerneltrap.org/node/5247
for further cutting-edge discussion on increasing performance through swap partitions.
2. Remove inactive services. Check all active processes on your system using
ps -aux from the commandline as the superuser. Since you are using Slackware, carefully evaluate each startup script to remove all unnecessary&unneeded services/daemons from startup.
3. Increased physical RAM. Seriously consider adding more physical memory if you wish to add future services to client systems connecting to your server, or if you wish to raise the number of client systems that can connect to this server at once (e.g., to Apache, Samba). A server-system with 2GB+ RAM is not unheard of for a web-serving host
4. Go though other LQ forums for other hints on this, e.g., LQ-Networking, LQ-Hardware, LQ-Slackware, ... etc.
As Hangdog42 refers to, the linux memory manager in the 2.4 and greater kernels is quite efficient, so that "~900Mb of used memory" just might mean many more SMB clients are accessing your server at once.
nycace36
Slack10.2 (eats a lot of memory)
