What would the normal be on the RAM usage while running idle? With 60% showing with corky running is this good? It seems a little high but didn't know.

Unused RAM is a waste of, er, well, RAM. Linux will allocate RAM for cache and buffers when it has more than it needs.

Conky actually has two variables called "memfree" and "memeasyfree". The latter includes memory that is easily freed up, from buffers, etc. Note that the default Conky config uses neither of these.

A quick experiment with both leads me to conclude that the RAM Usage shown in Conky is based on the memeasyfree context, i.e. it doesn't include RAM allocated to buffers, etc.

In general, there's not much to worry about with RAM usage. If your Swap usage is high, then the system is getting heavily loaded.

Hope this helps.

Thanks I am running about 2% swap which for this device overall is damn good I am thinking. RAM seems a little high would like to see it down to about 20% when idle but for as small of a device as this is it appears to be understandable

You may not have quite got what fnordianslip wrote.

When linux reads some data from disk, it leaves it in RAM, just in case it needs the data again. When all the RAM has been used and more data is read, it replaces data that has not been reread very often or was read the longest time ago. If All the RAM is being used by running programs, then some data is moved from RAM to swap.

A lot of data is read by linux just booting, so very little RAM is ever completely free.

OIC Thanks, I sort of had a brief understand of the ram and always thought that the lower the amount the better when idle for speed when running mutiple programs at the same time. Swaping I am not to sure about but knew it had something to do with the ram, process and cpu speed. It seems to be doing pretty good at the moment I just thought it may have been a little high. Thanks

Hi I'm a little curious that Conky shows that my swap is used at around 4% just while opening browser(inbuilt and after a reboot) and as I write it went up to 7%. From my understanding, shouldn't it be used only when RAM is fully used coz my RAM usage is just 66%? and also that I understand swap is slower than RAM. Is it normal? Thanks.

No, rarely used data often gets moved to swap and the ram freed used to cache often-used files instead.

Sorry but is the reply "No" an answer to my question "is it normal?"

Yes, it is.

Edit: 200th post, woohoo!

so what should be done??