On Thu, Mar 04, 1999 at 09:43:50PM +0100, root@lsne-dhcp-1-199.urbanet.ch w=
rote:
> Hello,
>=20
> I have just bought an U2W drive for my P2B-LS Board, and I have a little
> problem:=20
>=20
> I start by doing a newsfetch (for retriving some news...) and I have comp=
iled
> newsfetch, alevt, cdrecord and I do a top:
> CPU states: 0.5% user, 0.7% system, 0.0% nice, 99.0% idle
> Mem: 258012K av, 254920K used, 3092K free, 20456K shrd, 198200K buff
> Swap: 130748K av, 0K used, 130748K free 23840K cached
>=20
> Why so much buff, does it came from aic7xxx or my programm?
Well,
this also puzzled me, when I started Linux hacking in 1994.=20
You think, why does Linux need so much memory?
You should look at it from the other side:
There is hardware, CPU, RAM, etc. and Linux tries to make the best possible
use of it. Now, provided no process needs your RAM, it would be just stupid
to leave it unused. Linux uses it for buffering (caching) disk I/O and
speeding up I/O operations this way.
As soon as your processes need more memory, they will get what they ask for
and the buffer will shrink, until it is only a few percent of total mem.
Only then, Linux will start to page(swap) to disk.
[At least in theory; there were reports about Linux behaving badly in some
special situations, but that was back in the 2.1.9x days,. IIRC, and VM
(Virtual Memory Management) was improved quite a lot since then.]
Regards,
--=20
Dipl.Phys. Kurt Garloff <kurt@garloff.de> [Dortmund, FRG]
Plasma physics, high perf. computing [Linux-ix86,-axp, DUX]
PGP key: see mailheader / key servers [Linux SCSI driver: DC390]
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