Free phys. memory estimate.

[Gregory Pittman]

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Michael Green wrote:
>   
>> How one can tell how much precisely physical memory is free on a given system.
>>
>> I mean if I run:
>> # free -m -t
>>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
>> Mem:          2025       1880        145          0         40         87
>> -/+ buffers/cache:       1752        273
>> Swap:         4109       1723       2386
>> Total:        6135       3603       2532
>>
>> Looking at the table above I might conclude that 145M is all that's
>> left. but apparently this is not so, because a big chunk of RAM is
>> used for disk cache and can be quickly released/recovered should a
>> portion/all of that memory requested by a malloc.
>>
>> I'm trying to fugure out how much physical memory the system has
>> available at any given time. How can this be calculated, using what
>> numbers?
>>     
If you run 'top' in a command line, you get a value that's updated every 
few seconds. Type 'q' to stop it.

Greg