On 26/11/2015 04:22, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 26/11/15 01:05, wrote:
On Thursday, 26 November 2015 00:43:47 UTC, Rod Speed wrote:
"David Paste" wrote in message
...
Hello all.

I have recently installed Ubuntu 15.10 and after past failed
attempts at adopting Ubuntu, this time it is going very well (I'm
even considering buying an SSD for the machine).

I have some questions though:

In the System Monitor, under the Resources tab, the second display
down is "Memory and Swap History". I understand that Memory is
displaying the amount of RAM being used, but why does it slowly
increase when using Firefox? Even when just one tab is open.

Because Firefox is a steaming turd and does that on all platforms.

Its mostly due to the way it handles some web pages.

+1. Just kill it occasionally to reset.


What is Swap?

Stuff that needs more physical ram than the system has. That stuff
is put in the swap file, on the drive that is used for the swap area.

Yes, but with modern multi-gig RAM you're unlikely to use swapfile
space at all.



Well actually you are.

Sometimes the system decides to swap stuff out that hasn't been used for
ages so it has more pages for disk cache.

It doesn't NEED to, but it does.


Windows allocates swap for stuff it doesn't need to page. It does it so
that it can page if the memory is used. It doesn't mean it has paged it out.