memory usage on Scyld slave nodes (fwd)

[Rick Niles]

> It works fine, but when I use BeoStatus to look at the slaves it
> shows that the slaves all have about 400MB of their memory taken up.
> Anyone know what is eating up the RAM on those slaves?  Each node
> has a total of 512MB of RAM.  Why is beowulf eating up so much of
> it?  Thanks.

I'm adding up all the memory that's in use on the entire machine, include
buffer cache for the filesystem.  Linux tries to use any spare memory up
to about 90% of available as a cache of the filesystem.

I realize that this make that value in beostatus pretty much
worthless.  It's also been pointed out that it's also the more
expensive for the kernel to compute.  I believe "top" actually walks
though the proc table and adds up all the memory to get it's value,
but that also seems a bit expensive to me.

So short answer, it's not a problem, it's just not a real useful number
and I'll still deciding how to make it better.

	Rick Niles
	Scyld Computing Corporation.