[cobalt-users] memory use shown from free and top

[josh <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have become convinced I don't understand the meaning of the output
of the commands that show memory use. Shouldn't there be processes
running that would eventually, reclaim memory that is not used and
make the basic used numbers go down. As far as I can tell, I'm really
only using about half of the memory, most of the time.  Most of it is
available but seems to sit in the cache for reuse. This may well be as
it is supposed to be, but shouldn't it eventually - say during
relatively quiet times be reclaimed by the system, so the numbers go
down. The output from the three tools I know are displayed below:


[17:40:34:war-admiral:~]free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers
             cached
Mem:        514500     501704      12796          0          0
             259548
-/+ buffers/cache:     242156     272344
Swap:       524536      40792     483744

[17:34:54:war-admiral:~]cat /proc/meminfo

          total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  526848000 513257472 13590528        0        0 276025344
Swap: 537124864 41771008 495353856
MemTotal:       514500 kB
MemFree:         13272 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:             0 kB
Cached:         258796 kB
SwapCached:      10760 kB
Active:         211068 kB
Inact_dirty:    126908 kB
Inact_clean:     20668 kB
Inact_target:    71728 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:       514500 kB
LowFree:         13272 kB
SwapTotal:      524536 kB
SwapFree:       483744 kB

[17:38:55:war-admiral:~]top -n 1 -b          

5:39pm  up 20 days, 19:09,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
129 processes: 126 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 2 stopped
CPU states:  2.1% user,  1.7% system,  0.0% nice,  0.4% idle
Mem:   514500K av,  500164K used,   14336K free,       0K shrd,
0K buff
Swap:  524536K av,   40792K used,  483744K free
259508K cached


-- 
Josh Kuperman                       
josh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx