try vmstat, see all the options in "man vmstat" it reads from
/proc/meminfo and /proc/stat
#vmstat -a 5 -S m
on my system with 2 GB ram it shows that i'm having 18 mb free, 922 mb
inactive and 821 mb active
my running processes only use a tiny bit of my active ram, you can check
it with:
#ps aux | awk '{print $4"\t"$11}' | sort | uniq -c | awk '{print $2"
"$1" "$3}' | sort -nr
This is normal behavior, for better understanding please read this
excellent article from redhat:
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/001nov04/features/vm/
Sander
John Doe wrote:
> From: Peter Kjellstrom <cap at nsc.liu.se>
>
>> On Monday 06 July 2009, John Doe wrote:
>>
>>> When I do a free, I get:
>>> total used free shared buffers cached
>>> Mem: 18482800 18030668 452132 0 683068 9426792
>>> -/+ buffers/cache: 7920808 10561992
>>> But, when I do a ps, mysql is the only process that takes noticable memory;
>>> and it is far from 7.9GBs...
>>> USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
>>> mysql 28346 36.0 15.6 3241196 2884692 ? Sl Jul04 981:19 \_
>>> Once you removed the buffers and the cached memory from the total used
>>> memory... what is left? Looks like I have "something" (that is not
>>> buffers/cached) that takes more than 4GB... Could it be disk cache or is it
>>> included in the cached value?
>>>
>> /proc/meminfo may give you a more detailed summary.
>>
>
> Sadly, not much more information in /proc/meminfo...
> Same values as in free, since free reads it.
> Basicaly, 7.9GB are apparently used, but the sum of the memory used by all the processes is around 3.5GB...
>
> JD
>
>
>
>
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