Red Hat 9 and memory allocation

Has anyone had any trouble with Red Hat 9 running really slow and saying 95-100% of the RAM is in use?

I am currently running it on a 1.8Ghz, 256 MB RAM laptop, and it's basically crawling.

When I run XP on the machine (dual boot), it uses about 50-65% of the RAM.

Comments?

i always have the memory use up that high when i use a Nix box - u can see that i caches and buffers a lot of data, is most of the memory marked as in use? if it is, u could have a hugh memory hog running.
as for crawling along, is X configured correctly? proper drivers installed and all that? using a generic card driver gives horrible performance

Yes, memory is marked as 100% in use, and as far as I know X is configured properly (if it weren't, I wouldn't really know... or else I wouldn't have done it wrong to begin with)... I am using the non-generic ATI drivers for my card.

I would double check for a memory hog running and such.. and to see if anything is messed up with X that I may have missed the first time.

Thanks.

Run 'top' then hit 'M' (capital), it will show you the memory used by processes. If you don't see anything that hogs 95% to 100% there's nothing wrong, in fact it's normal. As elephant said, the kernel caches everything it can into memory and frees it when an application needs it.

Back then when I had my machine w/ 32MB of RAM right after it booted there were only like 32k free, after firing up Quake2 that was the same thing and it ran smoothly. That's why Linux is so great at memory allocation.

Exactly. My computer has 640 MB and it's not uncommon for it to use 100% as well.

Awesome, thanks guys.

Everything seems normal as far as the amount of memory used by the processes is concerned. Thanks for clearing that up.