What is "residual memory"? Can anyone explain?

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all.

I reported a bug in Amarok ( https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=288876 )
where it sometimes consumes over 10% of my RAM on startup, and it was closed
with this comment:

<<<<
Well, there is the virtual memory but it is the residual memory use that
matters. Yours us just 371M which is absolutely correct.
FWIW: I suggest you read up some documentation on dynamic memory use in Linux.
In short: the more memory available, the more will be used, the system
distributes this evenly to the running processes depending on their priority.

Not a bug.
>>>>

Well, I don't understand it. What is "residual memory" in this context (as
Google searches for it yields junk.), and why is still OK that Amarok consumes
so much.

Any insights would be appreciated.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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