Kubuntu eats out 7GB of RAM, why?

[kub-fu]

Hi,

I find it very disturbing that after upgrading my PC to 7 GB of RAM, those extra GB are eaten right away by just a few processes. That didn't happen when I had just 2 GB of RAM.

Can anybody help me sort this out?

Here's the output of free -m:


total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 6984 6939 44 0 57 6057
-/+ buffers/cache: 824 6159
Swap: 3153 13 3140


Here's a sample from top (sans pids and usernames):


PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
15 0 211m 29m 20m S 0 0.4 0:00.76 konqueror
20 0 21568 364 148 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 dbus-launch
20 0 23444 896 688 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 dbus-daemon
18 0 151m 12m 5332 S 0 0.2 0:00.12 python
17 0 3904 532 448 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 sh
15 0 156m 15m 11m S 0 0.2 0:00.16 kio_uiserver
15 0 190m 24m 17m S 0 0.3 0:00.26 konqueror
18 0 3904 564 464 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 soffice
15 0 730m 112m 74m S 0 1.6 0:06.04 soffice.bin
17 0 3904 544 456 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 swiftweasel
19 0 3904 572 468 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 swiftweasel
24 0 3904 584 464 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 run-mozilla.sh
15 0 506m 146m 27m S 0 2.1 0:40.14 swiftweasel-bin
15 0 298m 46m 25m S 0 0.7 0:09.98 amule
17 0 3731m 2376 1824 S 0 0.0 0:00.07 winewrapper.exe
15 0 10356 7940 612 S 0 0.1 0:06.84 wineserver
18 0 3778m 40m 11m S 0 0.6 1:26.54 utorrent.exe
15 0 99.4m 11m 10m S 0 0.2 0:00.17 kdocker
15 0 172m 54m 21m S 0 0.8 0:12.26 prism
15 0 48972 14m 8340 S 0 0.2 0:00.56 npviewer.bin
15 0 0 0 0 Z 0 0.0 0:00.05 prism <defunct>
17 0 3763m 18m 7968 S 0 0.3 0:00.21 explorer.exe
17 0 3904 540 456 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 keepass.sh
15 0 19504 12m 7596 S 0 0.2 0:00.73 keepass
15 0 21272 4112 1556 S 0 0.1 0:00.11 bash
15 0 19080 1264 876 R 0 0.0 0:00.00 top


How does wine use 3GB+ of memory? That's ridiculous. 500mb for firefox? 700mb for openoffice? come on, not even MS office used that much back when I used WinXP.

44MB of free RAM out of 7GB... Is there something I'm not getting? I was thinking of getting 4GB more, but I'm afraid they will be eaten too...

By the way, this is Gutsy Gibbon.

[rsambuca]

You have 6159MB of free RAM. 6057 is cached so that your machine runs quickly. If you open another application that requires RAM, then some cached items are cleared. This ensures the most efficient and fastest possible setup.

[kub-fu]

Oh, that makes sense.

It's annoying do, how sluggish the system becomes while it's freeing some RAM when I open new programs.

Thanks!