[luau] memory and writes to disk - linux behavior question

[Jeff Wong]

On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Charles Lockhart wrote:

> Any ideas as to what may be going on?  Is top lying, am I 
> misinterpreting the value that top is showing, is all the memory getting 
> mapped to the process even though it may not be completely used?
> 
> -Charles
> 

This is normal.  As far as linux is concerned, free memory is wasted 
memory.  If there is alot of unused memory linux will automatically grab 
it for disk/file buffering and will keep it until some other process 
requests a memory allocation.  If your using top, the amount of memory 
being used for this buffering is reported at the end of the 3rd line.  
While not exactly 'free memory' the delay it takes to deallocate from the 
buffer pool isn't very long and its started before the small pool of 
actual free memory is exhausted.

Jeff