Hi

I have a 2.7GHz Athlon with 1.5GB of memory and I regularly run large
executables >800MB. I'm having a problems with being unable to rerun them
after a completed run as it appears that memory is not being deallocated.
the command free -k yields

[azt@julliette half-hybrid]$ free -k

total used free shared buffers cached

Mem: 1550640 1081376 469264 0 11400 1006508

-/+ buffers/cache: 63468 1487172

Swap: 1823336 14420 1808916

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Allan

allan thomson wrote:
> Hi
>
> I have a 2.7GHz Athlon with 1.5GB of memory and I regularly run large
> executables >800MB. I'm having a problems with being unable to rerun them
> after a completed run as it appears that memory is not being deallocated.
> the command free -k yields
>
> [azt@julliette half-hybrid]$ free -k
>
> total used free shared buffers cached
>
> Mem: 1550640 1081376 469264 0 11400 1006508
>
> -/+ buffers/cache: 63468 1487172
>
> Swap: 1823336 14420 1808916
>
> Any help would be appreciated.

You may already know this but...
Linux uses memory to cache recently used programs and/or files.
If memory is needed it will either free physical memory or use
swap to free the needed memory. This is normal.

That said...
It doesn't look like anything is wrong from here. This is what
free shows on a system with 2GB of RAM and presently compiling
Mozilla.

free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2020 1919 101 0 585 959
-/+ buffers/cache: 374 1645
Swap: 972 0 972

And believe me when I say it works grrrRREAT!!

--
Confucius: He who play in root, eventually kill tree.
Registered with The Linux Counter. http://counter.li.org/
Slackware 9.1.0 Kernel 2.4.22 SMP i686 (GCC) 3.3.2
Uptime: 16 days, 5:22, 2 users, load average: 2.66, 2.38, 2.3

allan thomson wrote:
> Hi
>
> I have a 2.7GHz Athlon with 1.5GB of memory and I regularly run large
> executables >800MB. I'm having a problems with being unable to rerun them
> after a completed run as it appears that memory is not being deallocated.
> the command free -k yields
>
> [azt@julliette half-hybrid]$ free -k
>
> total used free shared buffers cached
>
> Mem: 1550640 1081376 469264 0 11400 1006508
>
> -/+ buffers/cache: 63468 1487172
>
> Swap: 1823336 14420 1808916
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Allan
>
As David Pointed out Linux cache's recently run programs in memory. It
should run just fine again a second time. Perhaps you need to
investigate the problem under gdb or see if there is a core dump of what
is going on. I'm curious why an application is 800megs though, or do you
mean the application NEEDS 800megs? I can see the later, the former
seems a rather bizare thing to do under a Unix style OS (it's really not
necessary like with windows it sometimes seems to be).

Wanderer