Resources related to RAM memory.

See also Linux with less RAM.

See AboutThesePages.

Contents

Tools

Some tools to check or monitor memory usage. Note that interpreting the results seems to be a black art in Linux. (You'll find all the "unused memory is wasted memory" and related statements, and the memory leak, virtual memory, swap, ... issues. One absolutely true statement -- more memory is better (although sometimes you will run into kernel limits on how much you can use without changing some parameters). Also, IME, Linux (from Caldera 2.2 to Mandrake 6.0 thru Mandrake 9.0) needs more memory for decent performance than Win95.

• free
• top
• vmstat
• gmemusage

Recent Statements about Memory Usage That I Don't Understand

from Karolina Lindqvist on debian-kde@listsPLEASENOSPAM.debian.org ca. 9 Apr 2003:

"Linux automatically uses spare memory for disk caching, so being starved on RAM not only causes swapping to disk of virtual memory, it also reduces the disk cache which increases disk traffic. So RAM starvation reduces performance a lot."

Is a double whammy implied?

Resources

• DDR-SDRAM Has Finally Arrived -- Tom's Hardware Guide article on DDR-SDRAM.

Contributors

• RandyKramer - 17 Mar 2002
• <If you edit this page, add your name here, move this to the next line>

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