[plug] memory question

[indy at THE-TECH.MIT.EDU]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 07:49:33AM +0800, James Devenish wrote:
> In message <20030629113813.C27882 at THE-TECH.MIT.EDU>
> on Sun, Jun 29, 2003 at 11:38:13AM -0400, indy at THE-TECH.MIT.EDU wrote:
> > and seems to use roughly 185 Meg.
> 
> Is that counting swapped bytes, or only resident bytes? If only resident
> bytes, someone might report a lower figure yet be using more memory in
> total because some bytes have been swapped to disk.

Ok I have mroe stuff running at the moment, so figures are a bit different,
but I was quoting the "Cached" figure, which I think is separate to
SwapTotal and SwapCached.

        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  261087232 256258048  4829184        0 93130752 59297792
Swap: 526409728 18862080 507547648
MemTotal:       254968 kB
MemFree:          4716 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:         90948 kB
Cached:          56036 kB
SwapCached:       1872 kB
Active:         137260 kB
Inactive:        70708 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:       254968 kB
LowFree:          4716 kB
SwapTotal:      514072 kB
SwapFree:       495652 kB


> 
> > apache is running 2 processes, roughly 3 megs each..
> 
> How is this reported in Linux? Perhaps there are two processes using 3MB
> each. Or maybe there are two threads using 3MB in total? Or two
> processes using 3MB each including shared data for a total usage that is
> less than 6MB? How do you find this out?
> 

To be honest, in this case it doesn't matter, they are using 6 Megs 
in the worst case. i.e. if I stop apache, mem usage goes from 
185 to 179 ish.... I don't know the best way to analyse this, I must admit,
but for my purposes 6 Meg is not really a deal breaker.


I'm trying to estimate the memory usage of a base system, so I can
help friends out who are considering Linux for image/sound editing stuff
get an idea of how much memory the need to buy.


Indy


-- 
Indranath Neogy
<indy at the-tech.mit.edu>