shen@athena.cs.uga.edu (Mr. Mingzuo Shen) (02/24/91)
I have a DECstation 3100 sitting on my desk and I have virtually
exclusive use although I am not the administrator. I was just reminded
that I am supposed to leave emacs running all the time (while after I
finished with one file, I quit vi). But I remember that emacs is a
memory hog. My question is: will it compromise my batch or background
programs (which could run four days one cycle) if I leave emacs running?
If I do a "ps aux" I found another interesting fact: the PostScript
previewer on the DEC, dxpsview, is an even stronger memory eater. The
following are using the major portion of the memory (I presume):
%MEM Command
14.2 egradbig (my background program)
10.4 - :0 (Xcfb) (the X server?)
14.6 dxpsview
5.2 /usr/bin/dxsession :0
4.4 emacs
My second question: these pecentages do not add to 100%. What do they
mean? I used a method suggested on the net (wc -c < /dev/mem) to check
the physical memory; I think there are 24 MB on this machine.
Yesterday I was trying to compile a FORTRAN program system on
this machine, but it gave many "system full", "binary write failed",
"write -1, instead of 8012", etc. (I do not remember the exact
words). The final binary file was not executable (I had to chmod +x,
and it gave me "Segmentation fault" after that). But the compilation
was OK when I used another identical machine (but virtually empty if
I check it with ps aux - only the Xcfb is eating about 8% of MEM).
My third question: did my failure in compiling the program have to do
with the memory usage?
Sorry if these questions are too obvious; thanks in advance on any
advise on memory usage on my machine.
-mingzuo