The K Desktop Environment

3.3. The Performance Meter Page

The Performance Meter Page provides two meters that show the overall processor load and the total memory used by the system. The red line in the memory history is the separation between physical memory (RAM) and swap space memory. Most Unixes try to minimize the accesses to the hard disk by caching files in memory. Therefore it is normal to always have almost the whole physical memory in use. This is not necessarily a sign of excessive memory use by certain programs but a sign of good caching strategies. Due to the very misleading nature of this meter I am planning to change it in one of the next versions to be more meaningful.