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Administrator | Posts: 1,036 | Thanked: 2,019 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Germany
#36
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.
I have running 8 xterms, torrents, mysql server and postgresql, apache a mythbackend (recording tv), and am using 265MB physical. In this case it means +/- caches and buffers as they don't count. it uses as much as it is able to! 5xx it uses, some 25x is cache and the rest (1500MB) is used for page files and other kernel stuff and is free in the second I need it, at this state my system even swaps some MB. swapping on solid devices isnt as bad as it was 4 years ago...
 

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