A few performance questions

[supraway]

Hey, I was wondering, is there a way to increase the amount of physical ram linux (in my case, RH 7.0) uses before reverting to swap? I have 256 megs of ram on my server, and using a memory usage module, I see that the memory is almost considered filled after booting up, running netscape, and starting an instance of HL dedicated server. I am really doubting this should happen so quickly.

[David]

type 'free' at the command prompt. If you have 256Meg you will probably see something like '256000 available, 1300k free'

Only a small part of that memory is actually being used. The spare memory that is NOT being used, Linux will temporarily allocate this to disk buffers etc to speed up performance. I have 384M RAM, there is usually only about 50MB free. Even when I had 128M RAM, I never needed more than 16MB of Swap. Don't worry about it.

[XWRed1]

What Linux is probably doing is filling your free ram with caches and buffers. Once that ram is really needed, it is provided.