64 bit info

[J]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:20, Karl F. Larsen <klarsen1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> top - 08:14:07 up 12:28,  3 users,  load average: 0.43, 0.18, 0.11
> Tasks: 145 total,   1 running, 144 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0
> zombie
> Cpu(s):  6.0%us,  3.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 90.7%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,
>  0.0%si,  0.0%st
> Mem:   1796700k total,  1451832k used,   344868k free,
> 139252k buffers
> Swap:  1959920k total,        0k used,  1959920k free,
> 757764k cached
>
> Notice I have 2 GB of RAM and the 64bit 9.10 is using just
> 1.45 GB of the RAM. I wasted $92 on new fast RAM which I was
> assured you need.
>
>        From these measurements it is clear that 64 bit runs fine
> with just 2 GB of RAM. The people claiming you need 4GB are wrong.

Yes, anyone saying you "need" 4GB+ to run a 64bit OS are wrong.  I
happily run them all day long on 1GB or more.  HOWEVER, the reality is
that you don't get any real benefit from 64bit addressing until you
are running 4GB or more RAM.

OTOH, statistics from top on a system that is idle are useless.
Especially WRT memory usage.  Linux does not utilize memory like
Windows does, and any linux system, after running for a while, should
show > 75% memory usage just by the nature of how Linux uses RAM.
Your 1.5GB are't all being used, a good bit of that is simply cached
pages.  That's part of how Linux gets its speed.  It caches everything
it can in RAM, clearing out the cached data in favor of fresh data
when needed.  It's completely possible to have a system doing
absolutely nothing show 99% memory usage.


-- 

Ted Turner  - "Sports is like a war without the killing." -
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