How to investigate sucked up RAM 3132

That says your memory is doing just fine. You have 517Mb available, and 9Mb is reserved to start any new processes (i.e., it is doing *nothing*, and is basically wasted). Usingtop-, as opposed tofreeit takes a little arithmetic to figure out how much memory the system is actually using for programs.

total - buffers - cashed - free = programs

So you've got 33 Mb being used by programs. Note that another 12.8Mb of program code has been swapped out because it is never being accessed (which free's up 13Mb of RAM for something useful). Basically your box is doing nothing right now!

But given that 16.5M of RAM is used for buffers and 458M is used for disk caching, obviously there has at some time been some significant disk activity. That activity is significantly faster if repeated disk i-o is done from the disk cache in RAM rather than the actual disk, so the fact that 458M of RAM is being used as cache is a *very* nice change from when you had only half that much RAM available!

Note that both the buffers and the cache can and will be abandoned in an instant if more RAM is needed for program end. The data is periodically written to disk, so almost all of that RAM is immediately available without any delay, yet if a disk read happens it will be very fast. (For example, every time you invoke a subshell it necessarily reads all of your shell init files... out of RAM instead of from disk, making it almost instantanious rather than noticably slow like it was way back when.)

The total virtual memory available is total + swap, so you could run close to 774Mb of programs before things crash.

Clearly if you are experiencing crashes, it isn't because of anything obvious from what you posted. The next question though is exactly what do *you* mean by "crash"? It rebooted? It froze? The program died? Give as much detail, for example any error messages from the screen or fromvar-log files, as you can.

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