Memory on Amit Agarwal Linux Blog

vmstat – what it is and how to use?

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 02:24:52 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

vmstat provides a summary of various functions within the system, including system wide free memory, paging counters, summarized disk activity, system calls and cpu utilization.

The output of vmstat and description of what each field means:

The first line of output from vmstat shows a summary since boot,
followed by the output over the last 3 seconds for each additional line.

Are you swapped? Increase the performance of Linux machine.

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:06:31 +0000

With the ever increasing cost of the Hardware, the amount of physical RAM available on the system is increasing day by day. For example, couple of years back, I had a system which was very high end Desktop with 256MB RAM and today I have a 2GB RAM Desktop. So, whats the point.

The Linux systems (right word should be kernel) are desiged to use both RAM and swap partition. Swap partition is a partition on Hard disk and is used mostly like RAM. Problem is that HDD access is always slower than RAM access and hence inherently, the system will work little slower even if you have enough RAM not to use swap. The term ”swappiness” is used to determine how the kernel should try to seam-balance between the use of RAM and swap. By default, most of the distro’s have a swappiness of 60. A higher value of swappiness means that the RAM will be swapped out faster.

Resolved - New window does not open in new tab after installation of some plugin's.

Thu, 13 May 2010 17:04:32 +0000

After I installed some plugin’s, the new windows were not opening in the tab. Rather they were opening in new window. This consumes time and memory which I did not like. I checked and re-checked to confirm that the setting for opening new window in tab was in there and still ………. alas……..

So, I reverted to checking if I could do something in the about:config entries to do the trick and yes it was there. Before we go into the specific entry, if you are interested, here is the link to the mozilla site for documentation on the about:config parameters. If you want to tinker with the settings, I suggest you first go through the list and make sure what you are doing.