What the hell is causing such memory load???

[xveganx]

I am running FC2 with KDE window manager
with 1 gb (2x512) Geil Ultra Series Dual Channel Pc 3200

When I first start up my machine my system monitor shows about 300 mb of 1013 mb being used.
After opening a couple applications or watching a movie , using gaim, gimp or whatever and then closing them all my mem load stays very high. What is causing this? how can a fix it.
Example ive been on approx 3 hours....
Ive done different things edited some pictures watched part of a movie and browsed the internet.
Now I have nothing but my system Monitor program running and this firefox browser and my Mem Load shows 992 of 1013. whats going on???

[kosmosik]

first of all - put this 1/2 screen image of your signature please!

second of all - WTF you need 1GB of RAM for if it stays unused? lets think - normal system operation takes somewhat of 200MB RAM (pesimistic aproach) - so you have 800MB RAM free... but free RAM is wasted, it is unused so it is exactly the same as you would not have this 800MB at all (if it is free it is like not installed in system).

Linux manages memory like that - when applications are in need for memory Linux gives it to them. but after it some memory is left free, so after some system operation (reading/writing files and so on) some of this operations are kept in memory (it is free so you don't waste nothing) it is called caching I/O operations. so to explain it more explictly, you have two choices:

X + Y == your total RAM

1. you have X memory taken by applications and Y memory free (unused, wasted).

2. you have X memory taken by applications and Y memory taken to cache I/O operations (to make things like reading from disk even snappier).

which option do you choose?

[Jman]

If I'm reading the number correctly, you're using 0 swap, which is good. Swap is on disk, it's slow compared to RAM. Slow == bad.

These caches should be replaced by regular memory if you open up more applications.

I doubt you have much to worry about, especially with 1 GB RAM.

[tk]

xvegnan: cat /proc/meminfo provides a more detailed view on how your linux kernel manages the memory of your box exactly, in particular of interest are:
Cached: data from files that might be needed again...
Buffers: modern OS don't write everything to disk right away... linux for example often maps files into memory - if anything gets changed its getting marked as "Dirty" and periodically (every 5 seconds or so) linux writes back the dirty pages in an (for the disks) optimized fashion.

[kosmosik]

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/001nov04/features/vm/

[xveganx]

Originally Posted by kosmosik

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/001nov04/features/vm/

thanx alot that explains ALOT.
THANX FOR ALL YOUR HELP GUYS