RAM space vs swap space

[Rick Rosinski]

> Look at how much of your swap is being used.  Swap is used as a last resort
> under linux.  It moves things that aren't being accessed anymore from RAM to
> swap.  Your system is using only 2MB of swap.  Is this with things like GIMP
> running?

No.  This was with minimal apps open.  No gimp running.  When I load Gimp and
work with images, lots of disk activity is happening, and free swap space
becomes low.  I just wanted to demonstrate how much memory is occupied by cache
and shared memory.  

I was informed that shared memory is for shared libraries, and having them
loaded into helps speed things up and so that apps using shared libraries
actually occupy less memory.

I would like to sacrifice the cache memory though, even though it is supposed
to shrink as apps need more ram.  I want as much ram free from cache and things
like that so that I can modify images in Gimp without waiting for the swap
memory to catch up with me (I don't like waiting, that is why I got more ram in
the first place).

Rick Rosinski
http://www.rickrosinski.com
rick@rickrosinski.com