Linuxguy123 wrote:
Dennis Gilmore suggested that I boot a 64 bit Live CD to see what it said about memory usage. So I did:
[fedora@localhost ~]$ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3969 1286 2682 0 143 827 -/+ buffers/cache: 315 3654 Swap: 1992 0 1992
Here is what it looks like under my 32 bit installation:
$ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3034 978 2055 0 33 619 -/+ buffers/cache: 326 2708 Swap: 1992 0 1992
I appear to gain 935MB of RAM running the 64 bit version. This is in spite of the spec sheet on my laptop saying:
Could it be simply that free does not show the space needed by the kernel.... which needs (at least some parts of it) to be constantly in memory. I do not think that 127Mb is such a big price to pay for the kernel. Note that to use your memory in a single process you need x86-64. The standard x86 linux limits the processes memory to 2Gb.