User Feedback :: Random crashes - require power off & reboot

My main machine is a 400Mhz 192MB. I run FF all day without issues. I do have a swap partition but then it rarely gets used. But then, I spend more time programming than being on the web.

Are you running many .dsl and .tar.gz mydsl extensions?
Are you using many plugins?

What does the free command show?

The only plugin likely to be running is usually Firefox or Opera and JRE, though I have quite a few downloaded on my persistent home. They are all .uci

To make a typical usage case, I started aterm, ted, opera and emelfm. When I ran the 'free' command, it says total memory 192mb, used 146, free 44. The display on the desktop says Ram usage: 39.8/187M - 21%. That's quite dramatically different, which should I believe?

Magnus

With free you don't count buffers and cache into used memory (ie subtract them and you will get the same result as the bar in torsmo). Free does count them into that, but it's no big deal, they are freed the second that ram is needed..

Quote (curaga @ Aug. 29 2007,08:25)

Free does count them into that, but it's no big deal, they are freed the second that ram is needed..

Ok, so either way it doesn't look like I'm running low on ram?

I forgot to mention - since I'm booting from a CF card, I'm running with no swap and the 'toram' boot option. So there's no flexibility on that upper limit.

Which is incidentally why I ended up choosing DSL over Puppy. I started out with Puppy, being slightly less minimalistic, some useful scripts & GUI things for n00bs. But it created a swap file without me noticing it, until I wondered why the hard drive light was flashing.. DSL has more of a learning curve, but at least it isn't second-guessing me like that!

I would try without 'toram'.
Also, seeing JRE, if you hit a site with Java then that would consume much memory.
Running without swap on 192MB means as soon as your free memory is consumed you will freeze/crash.
You almost need to be monitoring your free memory available.
Without a swap, perhaps you should consider some of the lowram boot options available with DSL.
See F2 and F3 at the initial boot prompt.

Next Page...
original here.