[K12OSN] memory issues

[Petre Scheie]

What does free show?  Top doesn't seem to show how much RAM is allocated to cache (hmm, 
never noticed that before).  Free does.  Remember, for efficiency, Linux allocates most 
of unused RAM to file caching under the theory that it's wasteful to have memory 
standing around not be used.  Here's what free shows on one of my systems:

              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       2010576    1946448      64128          0     160108    1009868
-/+ buffers/cache:     776472    1234104
Swap:      2096472          8    2096464

The memory used shows nearly all of the 2GB, 1946448K, in the server being used; but it 
also shows that 1009868K of that is devoted to cache.  As demand for more memory for 
apps goes up, the kernel will take memory used for caching and devote to the apps.  In 
your case, your swap used is still 0 which is what you want.  In other words, you have 
enough RAM.

Petre

Huck wrote:
> top - 11:34:14 up 23:45,  1 user,  load average: 6.18, 5.67, 3.73
> Tasks: 323 total,   5 running, 318 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 12.7% us,  6.4% sy,  0.1% ni, 76.9% id,  0.0% wa,  0.2% hi,  
> 3.6% si
> Mem:   4153708k total,  4094596k used,    59112k free,   479060k buffers
> Swap:  2040244k total,        0k used,  2040244k free,  2787320k cached
> 
> 
> 1 user is a lie of course there are at least 12 people logged in...
> I don't see any reason for this much memory to be getting sucked up 
> though...they are all running firefox AND/OR openoffice writer.
> 
> any ideas? I remember seeing a long while ago some cmd-line tool to 
> track memory usage ever-so-often...I've searched the archives and 
> google'd without luck finding it. anyone remember? thought it was like 
> "memd" or something
> 
> --Huck
> 
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