[Sunhelp] HW Questions

[Kris Kirby]

> Depends, what OS are you running?  Lots of people complain about this
> "problem" with Linux.  They close some application that was eating up 29MB
> of ram, and they get 2 MB back.  THIS IS GOOD.  It's keeping parts of that
> program loaded into ram until that RAM is needed by something else, thus
> speeding execution of that program if you run it again.  I don't know that
> much about memory management in Solaris, sorry.  If you're hitting swap a
> lot, get more ram.  
> 	Greg

Not wanting to start a Holy War, and notwithstanding the fact that FreeBSD
doesn't run on sparc hardware (yet)....

I have had Netscape gobble up 72 MB of RAM with windows all over the
place (it was very crowded on a 1024x768 display). When Netscape was
closed down to a single window, it was still holding on to 72MB of RAM
until I closed the program, when it gave it all back.

OTOH, it did give it back. I would think that Linux knows enough about how
to effectly manage memory, i.e.: marking dirty pages and flushing only
when necessary. One shouldn't expect to *always* have "free" RAM on a UN*X
box, less they have a huge amount of RAM. (I.E.: My PC with 320MB of RAM,
rebooted 41 minutes ago, has 272MB free. I also have a PC with 128 MB of
RAM [a 166 MHz one at that] that has 5480 KB free. It's uptime is 20 days
now [power outage for three hours, 15 min worth of backup :-/]).

-----
Kris Kirby, KE4AHR          | TGIFreeBSD... 'Nuff said.
<kris at nospam.hiwaay.net>    |    
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"God gave them the ability to reproduce...
	... Science gave us the hope they won't." -KBK