sleeping processes and swap

[Dale Farnsworth]

In article <op.tjqb7rchjr3qzh at localhost.localdomain> Mike wrote:
> lshw? List Hardware? That's a new one! I always thought there was a  
> command like this! Thanks for sharing. I had to apt-get it but here is  
> what the relevant section says.....
> 
>       *-memory
>            description: System Memory
>            physical id: 21
>            slot: System board or motherboard
>            size: 384MB
>            capacity: 512MB
>          *-bank:0
>               description: DIMM EDRAM
>               physical id: 0
>               slot: BANK_0
>               size: 64MB
>          *-bank:1
>               description: DIMM EDRAM
>               physical id: 1
>               slot: BANK_1
>               size: 64MB
>          *-bank:2
>               description: DIMM EDRAM
>               physical id: 2
>               slot: BANK_2
>               size: 64MB
>          *-bank:3
>               description: DIMM EDRAM
>               physical id: 3
>               slot: BANK_3
>               size: 64MB
>          *-bank:4
>               description: DIMM EDRAM
>               physical id: 4
>               slot: BANK_4
>               size: 128MB
>          *-bank:5
>               description: DIMM EDRAM [empty]
>               physical id: 5
>               slot: BANK_5
> 
> Hmmmmm... looking at the output it seems as if I had a dishonest salesman!  
> I bought 3 128MB chips (so he said). I don't know what this 'slot 5' is.  

Calm down.  No need to jump to erroneous conclusions.  The above shows 3
128MB DIMMS.  Each slot has 2 banks.  Two of the DIMMs use 2 64MB banks
each and one DIMM uses a single 128MB bank.

In theory, you could put in two 256MB DIMMs for a total of 512MB,
but I wouldn't add more memory without replacing the motherboard/cpu.

Let's back up a bit.  Nothing you have shown would indicate that you
are low on memory.  See below.

> All of the RAM slots have something in them and there are only 3. It must  
> be something to do with the manufacturing and onboard memory.
> 
> I really appreciate your guys help.
> 
> 3852645 KB =  total memory
> 768 M = system memory + banks 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. Is my system really not  
> accessing all of it's memory?

Redo your arithmetic, you have 384MB.

> bmike1 at 1[~]$ top
> top - 07:04:21 up 48 min,  2 users,  load average: 3.86, 2.94, 2.46
> Tasks:  86 total,   4 running,  82 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 66.4% us, 29.6% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.3% id,  0.3% wa,  2.9% hi,  0.5%  
> si
> Mem:    385264k total,   356868k used,    28396k free,    14972k buffers
> Swap:  1025000k total,        0k used,  1025000k free,   172972k cached

This looks good.  You are not low on memory.  In fact, you're not using
any swap space.  You have the misconception that having a low number for
the "free" number above is a bad thing.  It is good.  A good OS tries
to minimize this number.

Memory is used for three broad categories-- active, IO buffers and cached.