[Digikam-users] Any thoughts on RAM needs?

[Remco Viëtor]

On Tuesday 13 September 2011 12:14:32 Rinus Bakker wrote:
...
> How about this, can anyone comment on it:
> jansen at jansen-HP-Pavilion-dv7-Notebook-PC:~$ free -m
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:          3705       3672         32          0       1359       1307
> -/+ buffers/cache:       1006       2698
> Swap:         6171          0       6171
> jansen at jansen-HP-Pavilion-dv7-Notebook-PC:~$

One of the particularities of Linux is that any free RAM can be used to cache 
disk reads, so the 'free' part of the 'Mem' line shows less free memory than 
would be available to programs running (the 'cached' part can also be used for 
program memory, slowing disk I/O a bit).

Swap (being disk space) isn't used for caching, so there the 'free' value is 
correct. In this case, there's no swapping to disk ('used' is zero), so the OS 
has still enough free RAM to work with, and lack of free RAM doesn't cause the 
slowness (swapping to and from disk is slow...). Adding memory wouldn't have 
much of an effect if this is the worst case...