So, it's worse than I thought. I just opened up the KDE equivalent of top, and checked my total memory consumption: 890MB. It claims that the JVM instance supporting Eclipse is responsible for 400MB of this, followed by X and Firefox at 130 each, and then everything else. I have 1GB on this machine.
Obviously, hitting the end of physical memory is not the end of the world, especially given that a lot of that memory is cold, but I still don't like being too close to the top. I'm guessing that this is even more important with a laptop, because spilling to disk increases disk usage, and therefore consumes more power.
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Obviously, hitting the end of physical memory is not the end of the world, especially given that a lot of that memory is cold, but I still don't like being too close to the top. I'm guessing that this is even more important with a laptop, because spilling to disk increases disk usage, and therefore consumes more power.