boot time

[Richard Edelman]

Here's a nice quick explaination. :) Take a look at the output of the free 
command: 
[rich at rich rich]$ free
                total         used        free     shared    buffers    cached
Mem:        513316     508704    4612    688       29824     399872
-/+ buffers/cache:      79008     434308
Swap:       248968          0     248968

At first glance (to a linux newbie, or someone that doesn't really know how 
to read the output of the free command, anyway) it would appear that linux is 
using all 512MB of the RAM available on this machine, right? Wrong. :)  Don't 
pay any attention to the 'Mem:' line. Instead look at the '-/+ buffers/cache' 
line under the free column. There's still 434mb of RAM free. That's pretty 
much how much memory you have free. Linux is one of those things where the 
more RAM you give it, the more it'll appear to eat.

For faster startup on a workstation, don't bother starting up telnet, ftp, 
sshd, sendmail, httpd, and mysql. Unless you need them, that is. You can 
disable those via linuxconf, removing the symlinks in your /etc/rc.d 
directories, or whatever other tool your system has. Mandrake's Control 
Center allows you to do this pretty easily.  Also, that aurora package tends 
to really slow things down, although it's nice eye candy.

Rich

On Wednesday 14 November 2001 02:19 pm, D. Hageman wrote:
> Uhm.  I wouldn't worry about it.  The reason why it appears it uses so
> much memmory is because the design philosophy behind the kernel.  I could
> explain more, but it can get over technical real quick and would probably
> prove more confusing then helpful.
>
> On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, dlegion wrote:
> > I am not confident enough to mess with my kernal, let alone no what to
> > mess with once I started but I did want to learn how I could speed up the
> > time it takes to load linux.  I want a super fast boot up.  I want to
> > know what programs I can do without safely at boot up and just start them
> > as I need them, because I probably won't always make use of everthing.
> > Right from the start Mandrake 8.1 is using over 100MB of physical memory.
> > My system doesnt run slow but I still want to trim it up, If there are
> > any recourses specific to this I would apreciate a point in the right
> > direciton.
> >
> > Thank You.
> >
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