On a whim, I rebooted my work laptop and got my memory usage from Task Manager. I have some Intel security/administration stuff, a virus scanner, Mozilla quick launch, and some other assorted startup crap running on Windows 2000. My baseline memory usage was 122000K. After starting Mozilla to post this message, it went up to 132000K. After starting Outlook 2000, I peaked at 145000K before settling down to a steady state of 140000K. Before I rebooted, I was at 158000K.
What's your baseline memory usage, either at startup, with a normal load, or both?
On my Linux workstation with a running job on it, I have
Mem: 1028112K av, 984436K used, 43676K free
Swap: 2096440K av, 113192K used, 1983248K free
which tells me exactly nothing. Well, no, that's not entirely true: it tells me someone is running a big ass job on my computer, and that I have a lot of xterms and emacs windows open. And no, I'm not going to reboot it.
During the course of writing this post, my memory went from a low of 137000K after it paged out a few things to its current value of 151000K after starting VNC viewer.