Why use so much memory?!

I am using Java Desktop on Solaris 10. The Sun Blade150 machine has 768M physical memory and more than 400M is used before I start anything other than mozilla! That's more than double than any windows machines I have ever used.

I just joined this company and I have to use this machine as my workstation. It's sounds crazy to me!!!

Can I shut down anything below? Thanks.

Jirong

PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZERES STATETIMECPU COMMAND

423 jh1566611 42064M49M run58:34 5.36% Xsun

824 jh1566617 490 138M76M sleep 28:56 3.63% mozilla-bin

681 jh1566611 59070M20M sleep4:47 1.10% metacity

703 jh1566612 49077M19M run22:16 0.71% gnome-terminal

712 jh1566611 590 3320K 1424K cpu14:15 0.25% top

697 jh1566611 49067M12M sleep 11:50 0.23% gnome-netstatus

695 jh1566611 49068M14M sleep1:00 0.20% wnck-applet

679 jh1566611 59010M 4328K sleep0:24 0.11% gnome-smproxy

2110 jh156661 13 49069M24M run1:08 0.09% java

685 jh1566615 59074M21M sleep0:44 0.09% nautilus

683 jh1566611 59077M23M sleep1:14 0.08% gnome-panel

699 jh1566611 49066M12M sleep2:38 0.05% mixer_applet2

641 jh1566611 590 6992K 3672K sleep0:27 0.03% xscreensaver

527 jh1566611 590 2688K 1480K sleep1:23 0.02% xautolock

568 jh1566611 590 2544K 840K sleep0:04 0.02% dsdm

693 jh1566611 49066M12M sleep0:16 0.01% clock-applet

7 root13 59010M 3824K sleep0:40 0.01% svc.startd

687 jh1566612 590 9536K 5520K sleep0:22 0.01% gnome-vfs-daemo

[1548 byte] By [hujirong] at [2007-11-25 18:48:14]
# 1

How are you measuring windows memory usage? You might be comparing apples to oranges. The SIZE column from prstat includes virtual memory mapped by shared libraries so if you have several processes sharing the same library this memory is counted more than once. GNOME applets/applications make heavy use of shared libraries, but they also have been known to be more resource intensive than they need to be If you're concerned about memory usage, try removing:

gnome-netstatus; That blinking network applet

mixer_applet2; If you don't need sound, remove the volume control

xscreensaver:

pmap -x <pid> gives a good indication of where a process's memory is being used.

b.nitz at 2007-7-3 21:39:19 > top of Java-index,Desktop,Sun Java Desktop System...
# 2
Here is a good explanation from GNOME's Miguel de Icaza on how to interpret memory statistics: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/1999-September/msg00036.html
b.nitz at 2007-7-3 21:39:19 > top of Java-index,Desktop,Sun Java Desktop System...
# 3

Hi

Thank you very much. So now how do I find out the actul physical memory has been used?

The article gives: A good approximation is thus "RSS - SHARE".

1. How can I display the Shared part? Can anyone give me a command to display the actual memory used?

2. What does this output from 'top' means? "768M real, 341M free"?

.words:/home/jh156661 36 % top

load averages: 0.21, 0.21, 0.20 10:27:55

73 processes: 72 sleeping, 1 on cpu

CPU states: 88.7% idle, 7.2% user, 4.2% kernel, 0.0% iowait, 0.0% swap

Memory: 768M real, 341M free, 305M swap in use, 2305M swap free

Regards

Jirong

hujirong at 2007-7-3 21:39:19 > top of Java-index,Desktop,Sun Java Desktop System...