CPU and RAM Usage

[-JMC-]

I am running Fedora 9 and I installed Conky the other day. I used a monitor that showed me my CPU and RAM usage. When the computer is doing nothing the RAM usage is up around 40-50% and the CPU is around 20%. And this is doing nothing. Is this normal? What can I do to take both these loads down? Or how can I view what is actually eating up my RAM and CPU?

On a side-note, I don't notice the computer running slowly at all (it runs faster than on Vista, but that is to be expected) so I am not really worried about this, I just would like to take the values down.

Thanks

JMC

[markwolfe Veteran]

Well, is your conky.rc file set up to also show the tasks/PIDs with the highest usage, like this?

where you can see my sample shows my distributed computing (SETI@home and World Community Grid, being shown), plus transmission seeding 12 torrents and so forth.

If not, you can post the output of a top -n 1 command, which will take one snapshot of running processes sorted by CPU usage.

[Mouldy Punk]

  -JMC- said:

I am running Fedora 9 and I installed Conky the other day. I used a monitor that showed me my CPU and RAM usage. When the computer is doing nothing the RAM usage is up around 40-50% and the CPU is around 20%. And this is doing nothing. Is this normal? What can I do to take both these loads down? Or how can I view what is actually eating up my RAM and CPU?

On a side-note, I don't notice the computer running slowly at all (it runs faster than on Vista, but that is to be expected) so I am not really worried about this, I just would like to take the values down.

Thanks

JMC

Also, as far as your RAM goes...20% is a meaningless value. 20% of what? What size RAM do you have? If you're only using 20% of 32mb RAM...you're doing pretty well :p

[-JMC-]

@Mouldy Punk - Yeah I see your point lol, its 40-50% of 1GB

top -n1 - I've attached a screeny of that.

I am listening to music (rythmbox) atm so its a bit higher than usual.

I can't see anything out of the ordinary on there. Is there anything for the more trained eye?

Thanks

JMC

[markwolfe Veteran]

Well, your load average info didn't make the screenshot (it is on the line above the "Tasks" line). It shows general load based on number of tasks waiting on the CPU/scheduler to get around to them. Lower is better.

You have 1GB of RAM, and though it looks like most of it is "used", oyu see that 271K is allocated to caching data, and can be freed up at any time if an app needs it.

I see that your X is using 9.7% of your CPU (at least at the moment of the screenshot), whereas mine is at about 2%. Also your hald (hardware abstraction layer) is taking up a lot more CPU than on my system - but I really don't know Linux deeply enough to know if this is unusual. Some of that may be due to processor differences. I recently got this new PC, so am running a core 2 duo (I used to be on an old Athlon XP @1200MHz)

I'm not seeing anything to really be concerned about, especially if you say that performance is snappy. If you want to try an experiment, try installing xfce4 (yum install xfce4 should do it) and log out and log back in with XFCE selected as your "session" at your login screen. Then see if you notice any differences in usage.

[Mouldy Punk]

It's quite usual for linux distros to use what could be considered a lot of the RAM. That's the wrong way to look at it though. Free RAM is wasted RAM. As markjenson said, an extra 271K can be used if it needs it.

If you haven't noticed any performance hits, I wouldn't worry about it if I were you.

[-JMC-]

OK fair enough. As long as it responsive... and it is!