On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 07:13:55PM +0100, Ralf Ertzinger wrote: > Is the amount of memory that 'free' reports as 'free' (or /proc/meminfo > states as 'MemFree:') the amount of unrequested memory, or does it include > requested but not actually used memory? The latter. (MemFree is physical memory, not virtual memory, by the way.) > If the latter, where can one see the amount of unrequested memory? It's CommitLimit - Committed_AS. At one point there was a CommitAvail but it looks like it was removed in 2.6.10 because it's redundant: http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/10/24/118 BTW, with overcommit_memory=2, CommitLimit = (MemTotal * (overcommit_ratio / 100)) + SwapFree With the default of overcommit_ratio = 50, this simplifies to: CommitLimit = (MemTotal / 2) + SwapFree Unless you're setting overcommit_ratio to 100, this means that with 640MB of RAM and no swap, user programs are allowed to request 320MB of memory at most. I hope this helps... -Barry K. Nathan <barryn@xxxxxxxxx>
