[clmowers]

Hello all
Im running suse linux 9.2 pro on a dell inspiron 9300 and my system is max out. i have 512mb of ram and its using just about all 512. the KDE system gaurd is saying there is only 3 mb of mem left. im new to linux so im not sure what porcess i can kill to free up some memory. can anyone help me.

[tsunam]

Its actually highly doubtful that linux is using the full 512, what is actually most likely happening is that the entire 512 mb is in system cache, linux is far better at managing memory then linux is. One thing you can look at for memory use is called top.

To use it you need to open up a terminal and type in top. You should see a line near the top that says:
Mem: 385636k total, 364072k used, 21564k free, 125300k buffers
as you can see that most of the memory is "used" however nearly 1/3 of it is buffered to be used, but isn't actively being used, by anything.

[clmowers]

well here is a copy of the history. This is about average of what im running. As you see it look like that there is only about 25 megs free. give or take. When i open a program like like PIM it eats up just about the rest.

top - 12:57:04 up 6:00, 3 users, load average: 0.19, 0.74, 0.95
Tasks: 76 total, 1 running, 75 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 3.3% us, 0.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 96.3% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 515548k total, 511168k used, 4380k free, 21428k buffers
Swap: 1036184k total, 6388k used, 1029796k free, 347592k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
5267 root 15 0 82900 12m 68m S 2.3 2.4 13:03.58 X
8943 chris 15 0 33472 19m 27m S 1.3 3.9 0:00.86 kdeinit
1 root 16 0 596 148 452 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.09 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
3 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 events/0
4 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
5 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 netlink/0
6 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:17.47 kacpid
30 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.60 kblockd/0
40 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.34 pdflush
41 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.16 pdflush
43 root 6 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0
42 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.35 kswapd0
626 root 25 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
1393 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata/0
1395 root 23 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_0
1523 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 reiserfs/0
2227 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.05 khubd
2283 root 5 -10 1360 308 1212 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 udevd
2914 root 16 0 1432 436 1212 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 hwscand
2942 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khpsbpkt
2970 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 knodemgrd_0
2995 root 16 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pccardd
3511 root 18 0 1512 684 1244 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 cardmgr
4013 root 16 0 1444 604 1276 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.01 syslogd
4022 root 15 0 1516 576 1228 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 klogd
4754 root 16 0 2032 692 1868 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.07 resmgrd
4767 nobody 16 0 1428 488 1264 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 portmap
4876 root 16 0 4120 1540 3900 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.76 smpppd
4903 root 22 0 5148 1476 4752 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.05 sshd
4906 root 16 0 6196 4592 2084 S 0.0 0.9 0:00.00 antivir
4908 root 16 0 6196 4592 2084 S 0.0 0.9 0:00.00 antivir
4910 root 16 0 6196 4588 2084 S 0.0 0.9 0:00.00 antivir
5090 root 16 0 1388 528 1220 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 acpid
5111 root 16 0 2712 1180 2532 S 0.0 0.2 0:31.78 powersaved
5223 lp 16 0 6392 3016 3388 S 0.0 0.6 0:00.15 cupsd
5242 root 18 0 2072 820 1744 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 xinetd
5244 root 16 0 2620 696 2448 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 kdm
5282 root 16 0 43092 808 1940 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 nscd

[tsunam]

Well looking at it, yeah all your physical memory is being used, but I don't notice anything in particular using more then it should. The warning is correct about 3 megabytes of physical ram left however there is the swap partition (think ram on hard drive) that is also being used quite a bit. Its slower because of having to swap stuff around (why it has that name) however it won't kill you.

Its just very odd because I don't see anything running that is using that much memory. Do you get this use with just Xfreex86(gui running) and nothing else.

[clmowers]

Well i have the GUI running and most of the time i have email open. With some word doc and internet. For the most part there isnt really to much running in that sence. for example what happens is if i try and update a contact or something inside the email service, it will hang the screen will go black for a sec and then i get a error message stating something about the cpu is overloaded, process aborted. When i first got that error message, that when i was checking out the kdesysgaurd and i notice that the cpu usage was very low but the memory was extremely high. So i figured it had to so with the memory and not the cpu as it was not over loaded or even close being over loaded. as it a p4 extreme and thats a powerfull processor. so i couldnt see it being cpu overload.

[rob.rice]

is antivir an anti virus program ?
like my googling says it is ?
this could be the problem
viruses need a lot of help in linux to even run
and there olny about 6 of them in the first place
(even if you get one all it can mess up is the running user account {unless you are running as root} NOT the whole system)
kill antivir and find where it starts up at comment out the line that starts it

[clmowers]

Yes it is. Its a free antivirus that come with suse pro 9.2. i really dont like it i had the version for windows and it wasnt that good. Is there a util that will run the start up programs like in windows there is msconfig. is there something like that in linux or do i have to manually kill the start up?

[rob.rice]

some where in /etc/rc.d there is a configuration file that
starts antivir I run slackware and the startup files are setup defrently
the best advise I can give you is run ps -ejH to find where it started from then copy that file to a back up with
"cp rc.somefile rc.somefile.bak" as root that is login as root after you have made a back up edit the file and comment out the line with antivir or antivird in it
I think you have mcedit to edit it with
you should be able to get to a virtula termnal with
crtl+alt+F1 this is a job best done from the command line
even if you have a GUI tool to do it with you can't back out of a mistack as easly with a GUI tool as you can with a back up from the command line

[tsunam]

or you could avoid the mess of that and do the following

chkconfig --list
find the one thats for antivirus
chkconfig --del antivirus

reboot without antivirus starting. However that doesn't solve the memory issue you are having. I still don't see a reason why all memory is being used though