[mohaa] curious behavior

[Charles "BedMan" Bedford]

Um, I beg to differ.

Linux and BSD use of ram is documentable via both Top and PS.  There is an
ammount allocated for Buffer cache (file accesses are buffered here), Active
memory (where currently running processes are running), Inactive (where
allocated but unused memory is listed) and Free memory (which hasn't been
touched).

If you will note the following line:
Mem: 35M Active, 319M Inact, 58M Wired, 21M Cache, 54M Buf, 2840K Free
Swap: 881M Total, 8K Used, 881M Free

This illustrates my points from above.  This is a box with a single MOHAA
server running on a system with 2 P2-400's and 479mb ram running FreeBSD
4.6-p2.

Also note that Swap is virtually unused.  When a system is very busy, and
all it's ram is allocated, it starts to allocate swap space to cover the
potential overage in ram allocation.  Active programs stay in physical
memory, and inactive ones are sent out to swap space, which is disk, and
considerably slower.

There is almost a science to figuring out exactly what is going on in a unix
system in general.  Don't be intimidated by it, just read the man pages on
TOP and PS and see what you can figure out.  Feel free to fire a few
questions my way if you want specifics.

	-- Charles 'BedMan' Bedford
		QuakeCon Server Manager
		http://www.quakecon.org

-----Original Message-----
From: charles 'wokka' goldsmith [mailto:wokka at justfamily.org]
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2002 7:55 PM
To: mohaa at icculus.org
Subject: Re: [mohaa] curious behavior


linux will always use up all of the ram according to ps and top
however, it will nicely give up ram to processes that need it, until it runs
out of course...

its hard to gauge ram usage in linux...
but you should be fine with 2 gigs with what you have running

wokka
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Mabe" <docseuss4977 at hotmail.com>
To: <mohaa at icculus.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2002 6:54 PM
Subject: Re: [mohaa] curious behavior


> and using up virtually all of the ram.