[CentOS] 2.6 memory management question

Tue Apr 10 17:44:31 UTC 2007
tblader <tblader at flambeau.com>


John R Pierce wrote:
> tblader wrote:
>> [2]$ cat /proc/meminfo
>> MemTotal:      7128956 kB
>> MemFree:       2132556 kB
>> Buffers:        556832 kB
>> Cached:        2821408 kB
> 
> 
> you do realize, out of that 7GB of ram, 2GB is unused entirely, and 
> 2.8GB is being used as disk cache, another 500MB as buffer space... so 
> in fact program memory usage is down around 2-3GB ?


Thanks for breaking that down. No I'm not all that familiar with swap
details so it helps to have some insight. The box flatlined around 3am
on Monday morning and memused (sar) was around 96%.  All the swap space was
untouched.  Maybe every process running was active, and unable to be
swapped, so the box just up and died when a request came in to allocate
more ram.  I just don't have enough of an understanding of swap to say
that was what happened.  I do remember a day when you could heat a small
room with the swap activity generated on earlier 2.x kernels, but things
seem much different with 2.6.

Thanks for your insight,
Thomas




-- 

Flambeau Inc. Technology Center - Baraboo, WI
Email    : tblader at flambeau.com
Keyserver: http://pgp.mit.edu KeyID: 0x00E9EC2C