hello kind people. I have a problem that i could use some help with. i am currently running win xp with mandrake 8.2. i partitioned the drive with partition magic and i made the swap file for 7.8 megs which i belive is too low??. im not sure but when i boot into linux it says that only 56% of my ram is free and whne running programs and closing them i noticed that very little of the ram is being returned. i have had no problems in windows with my ram. i also have noticed that when running the "top" command that it states that i have 108 processes running which i think is way too many and it also says that my cached ram is 56,000 k which is quite alot. also the number of sleeping processes is 87 -- high i beleive. well i was just wondering what i can do to free up my ram and run linux to its max. i would love to get some help with ur suggestions on the problem. THANKS ALOT!

Your swap is way to small, should be set at least equal to your ram. Depending on your install choices, you may have enabled a lot of apps, like ftp, http servers to be running. Also X and KDE/Gnome will add a substantial to your memory load. 56% load w/ 256MB, depending on your curretn running environment doesn't sound too bad. Apps are held in the cache when closed, it helps speed up re-opening them, this memory is freed if needed. To see what are the real memory pigs sort the processes in top with shift-M then list the top processes in the command column here. Also do a sort with shift-T to see which processes are consuming the most cpu cycles. List the top few processes here too.

And try to turn off as many unrelated daemons as possible. For instance, if you don't host a webserver, then why run httpd! If you don't run ftp server, then why run proftpd or wu-ftpd... I can go on and on and on and on (but I am not)!!! Then, you may want to look into "parted" to resize your partitions to increase the size of your swap space; should be double the amount of RAM you have. Lawrence