Lost: 110mb of RAM.

[ybw]

Here's my problem.
I boot the machine, and I have around 17mb of RAM in use, as shown here (http://www.geocities.com/ybw_duke/bleh1.txt)

I then FTP to the box from my win2k machine, and memory usage look's like this (http://www.geocities.com/ybw_duke/bleh2.txt)

I then start transferring a large file to my windows machine and memory usage start's to look like this! (http://www.geocities.com/ybw_duke/bleh3.txt) :eek:

Now where the hell is that memory going? Surely transferring a file doesn't eat up 110mb of RAM!
As can be seen from the process listing, there is nothing close to eating that much memory, so wtf has it gone?
It's not just the program "top" that shows this sort of usage, "free" tell's me the same thing.

Even after in.proftpd has finished, the amount of free memory is still rock bottom.
Could this be a problem with the kernel reporting memory usage incorrectly, or is there a big problem with ProFTPd?

Any thought's most welcome.

Andy

[aef]

This is just an effect of the way Unix does disk caching/buffering; it shouldn't impact on performance. It's quite normal for machines with huge amounts of RAM to be going slightly into sway at any given time (which is why you should always have some).

Page faults are a much more reliable way of telling if your machine is suffering from insufficient memory.

AEF

[ybw]

Ahh thanks.

Soon see how it holds up when running 3 quake3 server plus hosting anonymous FTP(just patches!) for 30 or so LAN gamers :)