memory (RAM) question

[ToddAndMargo]

Hi All,

I installed FC16 from the 64 bit Xfce spin on a customer (Dell Optiplex 330) two weeks ago. He is complaining of performance problems. On analyzing the situation, I am finding him running out of RAM memory. He currently has 2 GB.

His programs freeze. Hard drive LED goes on solid. Hard drive rattles like it is going to fly apart. "free -m" says he is max'ed out. Hard drive stops and programs start working again. This is especially a pain in the neck when printing: six pages takes fifteen minutes.

I currently have him running only one program at a time, which does help.

Since the Optiplex 330 will only support up to 4GB, I was going to up him to 4 GB.

Question 1: will 4GB be enough? He uses Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office. And he prints to an HP ink jet.

Question 2: what can I turn off to decrease his memory usage?

I am concerned that if I up his memory, he may still have the same problem.

Many thanks,
-T

[marko]

Originally Posted by ToddAndMargo

Hi All,

I installed FC16 from the 64 bit Xfce spin on a customer (Dell Optiplex 330) two weeks ago. He is complaining of performance problems. On analyzing the situation, I am finding him running out of RAM memory. He currently has 2 GB.

His programs freeze. Hard drive LED goes on solid. Hard drive rattles like it is going to fly apart. "free -m" says he is max'ed out. Hard drive stops and programs start working again. This is especially a pain in the neck when printing: six pages takes fifteen minutes.

I currently have him running only one program at a time, which does help.

Since the Optiplex 330 will only support up to 4GB, I was going to up him to 4 GB.

Question 1: will 4GB be enough? He uses Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office. And he prints to an HP ink jet.

Question 2: what can I turn off to decrease his memory usage?

I am concerned that if I up his memory, he may still have the same problem.

Many thanks,
-T

Something else is wrong, I have a Sony Vaio laptop with 4GB and can run the much heavier KDE4 desktop and heavy apps like Netbeans (Java JDK development tool) and Intellij (IDE) and Firefox + adobe reader, etc and I still don't use the swap partition. At least not right away, what will happen is if I run some big apps and then do a big yum update, it might push a small amount to swap like a few tens of megs due to old cache or buffered data.
When I log into KDE and start Firefox and immediately run "free -m" I get a "used" of 564Meg and 3477Meg "free" to give you an idea.

So if I were to take away 2GB to be like your case, I'd still have a free of 1477 Meg which is a lot. It would be a good idea to use the task manager/system activity panel to show list of the processes sorted by the memory column (RSS or "memory", pay less attention to the 'shared memory'). This might give a hint to the problem

[ToddAndMargo]

Thank you. Good idea.

By the way, I am getting the same drags on one of my own Scientific Linux 6.2 x64 boxes in my shop with 2GB of RAM. gnome-system-monitor says I am only using 127 meg for Firefox, the top memory user. But "free" says I only have about 27 meg free. Hmmmm. The plot thickens.

That yours works fine on 4 GB is good news for me.

-T

[marko]

Remember also that "free" reports three lines, the free amount that really is meaningful is in the 2nd line down. That one takes into account the fact that buffered and cached RAM in Linux is really available in an instant if it's requested. The first "free" output line doesn't correct for that and implies a ram situation that's worse than it really is.

So when you use the free command, use the amounts in the second line that starts with "-/+ buffers/cache:"

[Chilly Willy]

For what it may be worth, I run 4G of RAM here & I looked in the gnome-system-monitor under PROCESSES & it says that PYTHON is eating 1.5G. That to me is a BIG CHUNK. But for me having 4G isn't an issue but for someone only having 2G I wonder, would memory management of the OS act accordingly & not use as much or could this be what is eating the OP's memory?

[ToddAndMargo]

Originally Posted by Chilly Willy

For what it may be worth, I run 4G of RAM here & I looked in the gnome-system-monitor under PROCESSES & it says that PYTHON is eating 1.5G. That to me is a BIG CHUNK. But for me having 4G isn't an issue but for someone only having 2G I wonder, would memory management of the OS act accordingly & not use as much or could this be what is eating the OP's memory?

On my shop computer ( 2 GB, SL 6.2 x64), as I browsed with Firefox to this forum, I got a ten second drag while my hard drive rattled away. This its "free" and "meminfo" which I may have been reading wrong:

-T

$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2006 1026 979 0 37 456
-/+ buffers/cache: 533 1472
Swap: 1997 0 1997


$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 2054244 kB
MemFree: 980876 kB
Buffers: 38864 kB
Cached: 470984 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 616932 kB
Inactive: 288196 kB
Active(anon): 395584 kB
Inactive(anon): 8028 kB
Active(file): 221348 kB
Inactive(file): 280168 kB
Unevictable: 0 kB
Mlocked: 0 kB
SwapTotal: 2045944 kB
SwapFree: 2045944 kB
Dirty: 0 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 395408 kB
Mapped: 94300 kB
Shmem: 8332 kB
Slab: 83964 kB
SReclaimable: 22888 kB
SUnreclaim: 61076 kB
KernelStack: 2280 kB
PageTables: 24512 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 3073064 kB
Committed_AS: 1536288 kB
VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed: 69056 kB
VmallocChunk: 34359617696 kB
HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB
AnonHugePages: 139264 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
HugePages_Surp: 0
Hugepagesize: 2048 kB
DirectMap4k: 7552 kB
DirectMap2M: 2088960 kB

[Chilly Willy]

I was gonna post some comparisons, but PYTHON's not using that much memory now. Not sure why, either.
Your FREE -M looks very close as to what I had.

But this is what I was referring too - notice the MEMORY column.

[Chilly Willy]

I found out that PYTHON (in my case) is for my gDESKLETS - but I still don't know what the deal with the memory usage was all about. (yet)

So if that machine is running anything like that, it may be the same...

[Magickman]

I'm running the KDE 86_64 version myself, with 3 Gb of RAM, and Fedora flies. Here is my output for
$ cat /proc/meminfo:
MemTotal: 2825936 kB
MemFree: 183480 kB
Buffers: 73060 kB
Cached: 913112 kB
SwapCached: 5732 kB
Active: 1397568 kB
Inactive: 998924 kB
Active(anon): 1050960 kB
Inactive(anon): 415752 kB
Active(file): 346608 kB
Inactive(file): 583172 kB
Unevictable: 0 kB
Mlocked: 0 kB
SwapTotal: 4929532 kB
SwapFree: 4908208 kB
Dirty: 264 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 1406996 kB
Mapped: 147104 kB
Shmem: 56392 kB
Slab: 122712 kB
SReclaimable: 75720 kB
SUnreclaim: 46992 kB
KernelStack: 3240 kB
PageTables: 46104 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 6342500 kB
Committed_AS: 3695660 kB
VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed: 93736 kB
VmallocChunk: 34359625740 kB
HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB
AnonHugePages: 344064 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
HugePages_Surp: 0
Hugepagesize: 2048 kB
DirectMap4k: 298688 kB
DirectMap2M: 2584576 kB
DirectMap1G: 0 kB

[ToddAndMargo]

Follow up: upgraded the customer from 2 GB to 4 GB. He is now a happy camper. Also had a second problem of a loose color ink cartridge, which the 2 GB memory got falsely blamed on. All is well now.

Thank you all for your tips and suggestions!
-T