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Why is Mandrake using so much RAM?

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I'm in the process of learning linux - I installed Mandrake 9.0 yesterday afternoon. I don't usually leave my system on overnight, but I figured that with the new stability of Mandrake I can do that. However, I'm seriously worried about the amount of RAM that it's using. I woke up this morning and there was 4.5 MB of ram left out of the 512 MB that I have on my system. Here's a snapshot of my 'top,' and I'd appreciate it if SOMEONE could tell me what's going on! I'm using Gnome, by the way, but I used KDE a little too:

8:56am up 7:31, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.03, 0.00
66 processes: 64 sleeping, 1 running, 1 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 0.2% user, 0.9% system, 0.2% nice, 98.5% idle
Mem: 515784K av, 508948K used, 6836K free, 0K shrd, 37188K buff
Swap: 248968K av, 0K used, 248968K free 335980K cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM CTIME COMMAND
3822 mike 12 0 25920 25M 14000 S 1.9 5.0 0:05 mozilla-bin
1196 root 15 -10 63084 18M 7296 S < 0.9 3.7 0:20 X
3785 mike 15 0 9544 9540 7368 S 0.9 1.8 0:00 gnome-terminal
3836 mike 15 0 1012 1012 804 R 0.9 0.1 0:00 top
1 root 8 0 484 484 420 S 0.0 0.0 0:36 init
2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:01 keventd
3 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kapmd
4 root 19 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:01 ksoftirqd_CPU0
5 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:01 kswapd
6 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 bdflush
7 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:07 kupdated
8 root -1 -20 0 0 0 SW< 0.0 0.0 0:00 mdrecoveryd
12 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:09 kjournald
97 root 9 0 956 956 768 S 0.0 0.1 0:06 devfsd
193 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 khubd
400 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:02 kjournald
809 root 8 0 516 516 448 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 dhcpcd

Thanks.
 
Linux will use whatever RAM it can find for stuff such as filesystem caching, etc, so if you run it for a while and look in top, it will almost always show it at near 100% usage.

Oh and just to clarify, it will let go of that RAM if a program needs it, so don't worry. 🙂
 
Awesome! So you're saying I won't see a decrease in performance if I need to run a big program? I was wondering how much ram would be enough if 512MB wasn't 🙂.
 
Awesome! So you're saying I won't see a decrease in performance if I need to run a big program? I was wondering how much ram would be enough if 512MB wasn't
Click to expand...

Correct. The data in that memory is redundant because it mirrors what's on the disk so that all file access don't have to really touch the disk since it's so slow. As soon as memory is needed for something else it'll be reassigned to that new app.

As long as you're not using a lot of swap, don't worry about it.
 
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