Re: Fedora Core 3, all 1.5Gb memory used, how to free it?

From: Steve Ackman (steve_at_SNIP-THIS.twoloonscoffee.com)
Date: 08/01/05 

Date: Mon, 01 Aug 2005 06:28:37 GMT

On Sun, 31 Jul 2005 02:15:30 GMT, Ohmster <notareal@emailaddress.com> wrote:

> Agreed, but it is not normal for System Monitor to take forever to open up
> and for the application to become unresponsive, due to lack of memory?

  With 1.5 GB of RAM, it was certainly not from lack
of memory.

> I
> had to force the program closed and tried it several times in an attempt to
> get more information on what was going on with system resources. I was so
> sure of this that I really did not do more tests at the time. Perhaps I
> should have?

  Yes. You should have run 'top' to see what was
using all your resources. Sluggish behavior can be
caused by CPU load, disk access, or by swap. The
top utility looks at all of those... though the way
it reports them can be somewhat cryptic.

  One thing that isn't cryptic though is if your
load average is above 3 or 4, you need to look at
the first line in the process list to see what the
resource hog is. IME, it's usually a java_vm that
was supposed to die but didn't, or a mozilla that
suddenly started using up 60 or 70% of CPU cycles,
or an updatedb running concurrently with some other
heavy disk access app.

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