Memory Usage: Hm...
Now, I know that each monitor is going to look at memory usage a little differently and end up with a slightly different result from another, but this one is just downright messed up:
Both top and gnome-system-monitor were running side-by-side as they are in this screen shot. Notice that top displays some ~90MB's free whereas gnome-system-monitor has only ~170MB's used. I was confused too and I'm not sure if I'm just reading this wrong or what, but they are quite different. I also realize that top looks at a few extra things that gnome-system-monitor may not pick up on, so that would make for difference also, but I figured they'd be within striking distance of one another. Very odd, to say the least. I'm going to have to see if I can get another monitor to give me some clarification. Interesting... at any rate, in a practical sense, my machine is running nicely with XGL, Firefox, Gaim, and Jamboree so I'm led to believe that gnome-system-monitor is a little closer to being more correct than top, but that seems odd to me still.
...Hey, it beats studying.
Both top and gnome-system-monitor were running side-by-side as they are in this screen shot. Notice that top displays some ~90MB's free whereas gnome-system-monitor has only ~170MB's used. I was confused too and I'm not sure if I'm just reading this wrong or what, but they are quite different. I also realize that top looks at a few extra things that gnome-system-monitor may not pick up on, so that would make for difference also, but I figured they'd be within striking distance of one another. Very odd, to say the least. I'm going to have to see if I can get another monitor to give me some clarification. Interesting... at any rate, in a practical sense, my machine is running nicely with XGL, Firefox, Gaim, and Jamboree so I'm led to believe that gnome-system-monitor is a little closer to being more correct than top, but that seems odd to me still.
...Hey, it beats studying.
posted by dswain at
4/04/2006 06:47:00 PM
5 Comments:
Funny, I just did a write up about memory usage in Camino versus Safari.
By
Shadywack, at 4/08/2006 7:32 PM
The difference is that "grep Mem" is actually picking up the caches too. Gnome-system-monitor actually does display the same number as the "free" command does.
BTW, on Gnome 2.14 Beagle is starting indexing automatically and that can take up to 40 MBs of RAM without the user's knowledge. If you are not using Beagle, it's recommended you remove it from your system completely.
By
Anonymous, at 4/10/2006 6:41 PM
Hm... I'll give it a check now.
bash-3.1$ top
top - 21:43:36 up 6:17, 1 user, load average: 0.06, 0.42, 0.62
Tasks: 56 total, 1 running, 55 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 4.7% us, 0.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 95.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 515396k total, 493720k used, 21676k free, 57840k buffers
That's from top. Here's my results from free:
bash-3.1$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515396 493532 21864 0 57840 236948
-/+ buffers/cache: 198744 316652
Swap: 586364 0 586364
And still gnome is reporting that much less is being used. Maybe it includes caches into the total when it's calculated for free? Maybe Gnome changed the way they calculate it recently or something? I have no idea.
Yeah I don't run Beagle anymore either. I did for a bit, but it doesn't serve much purpose for me at this point, so I didn't bother with it. Thanks for the comment! It's really a pleasure to have a comment from one of the original leaders of OSNews!
By
dswain, at 4/10/2006 8:48 PM
Yeah, Gnome is changing the way it calculates stuff in almost every release. ;)
On FC4 for example, gnome-system-monitor would report a 230 MBs of RAM usage on a default installation, while FC5 reports only 90 MBs. Go figure. :-)
By
Anonymous, at 4/10/2006 10:50 PM
Very true I suppose. At any rate, Gnome seems to be running phenomenally from 2.12-2.14 for me. I never really stuck with Gnome until this release for that reason. Even if it's just reporting it differently, it sure doesn't feel like that's everything. I guess all those reports were true; then. They've done some great work on improving performance.
By
dswain, at 4/11/2006 8:32 AM
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