Linux Exercise

Here are some things that you will want to try:

Run htop and/or the other commands you learned in lab 7 (top, free, vmstat, proc/meminfo)

Note memory usage on your machine

Open several applications and make a note of the statistics in the applications

Close an application or two and see what happens to the memory usage

Open many applications and/or load the CPU with an intensive application like a game

that is running, or video and watch the results.

Try to understand why RAM and Swap memory behave as they do.

After you have made your observations about memory usage, try the following:

Open many programs to load up memory and cache. Note the cache size. Then, close the programs and look at the cache. It may not have changed because garbage collection has not yet happened. Now, manually clear the cache by using the following command.

sudo bash -c sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Observe the memory statistics after running the command and explain your findings.