I ran vmstat -s recently and was not amused...

With the X server running, it reported 350 pages wired down.
After quitting X, I still had 313 pages wired down.

OK - that's 296K of memory for the X server (why?  Why not chip?)

But: Why do I have 313 pages wired down when in "normal" mode?  That's
2500K of memory gone, ostensibly for purposes internal to the kernel!

I am assuming that the memory occupied by the kernel itself is not
included in vmstat's total.  Even if it was, that's not sufficient
to explain over 2 megs of internal use.

I've only 8M of core, and if I can get some of that 2M back, my machine
would be much happier under X.

Note: there was no I/O or anything going on when I did the vmstat.  So
those wired pages were not disk I/O in transit or anything.

-- 
David Jones, M.A.Sc student, Electronics Group (VLSI), University of Toronto
        The Toronto Free-Net... paving the information superhighway.
email: dej@eecg.toronto.edu, finger for latest Free-Net info/PGP public key

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