Spock’s blog

Why is linux using up so much memory?

I get this question a lot of time, most of the time like “You said linux runs perfectly on older computers, but it’s using a lot of ram on my newer pc.”

This actually has multiple reasons. The first one is your choice of the software and the distribution. Many linux distributions like Fedora starts services while booting, while nobody on a desktop pc needs them. This slows down the booting process, and it uses a plenthora of system resources and ram. And about the software choice, if you run linux on an older pc, please do not try to run Gnome/KDE, it will be slow, and it’ll be wasting resources. Try Xfce or Fluxbox instead.

This usually isn’t the answer, because most people are running it on newer pc’s on their desktop, while slower ones are usually used as a server.

But, when they do a free -m on their commandline (and they have 512 mb RAM), something like this is shown:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 502 494 8 0 16 188
-/+ buffers/cache: 288 213
Swap: 1011 0 1011

(This looks wrecked, look at the source for a better view ;))

Anyway, they look at the first line, and the first line says that 494 mb is used. Almost all memory. But, the second and third line are more interesting, the second lines tells us 288 mb is used and 213 free. This is because linux caches files in memory to acces them faster. (Though 288 mb is quite enormous :P, but this pc is running a few servers and processes that are usually not needed, it’s one of my testing PCs)

Conclusion

Linux isn’t using as much resources as it seems, and it’s perfect for computers with less RAM, if you know what distribution to use and what software to install.

If you’re not sure what to use on your slower system, ask it on a linux forum, or look with google.

Good luck