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Posts: 237 | Thanked: 167 times | Joined on Feb 2007 @ Powell, OH
#19
Originally Posted by bugelrex View Post
To give people an idea of how much RAM is generally available:

with only the following open: photobrowser (no pic loaded), calculator, xterminal, web browser with cnn.com open there is 5MB free physical free out of the 256MB
- with no apps open, there is 30MB physical free out of the 256MB

Kind of disappointing that your forced into swap if you run more than just the web browser.

Its kinda like running Vista (uses 800MB) with only 1GB RAM. Its fine unless you run several 'large' apps (Firefox, MSWord, Excel, playing a movie etc)

For those who are not aware, virtual RAM is not 'magic', there is a cost. If there are multiple apps actively competing for the virtual RAM, the O/S is going to use up CPU cycles to page in/out from disk into RAM plus the wait time for the IO the complete.
Linux uses free memory as cache so you can't just look at memory free and determine the available memory for applications.
 

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