On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 03:42:53PM -0800, Daniel Walker wrote: > "Currently there is no way to figure out the droppable pagecache size > from the meminfo output. The MemFree size can shrink during normal > system operation, when some of the memory pages get cached and is > reflected in "Cached" field. Similarly for file operations some of > the buffer memory gets cached and it is reflected in "Buffers" field. > The kernel automatically reclaims all this cached & buffered memory, > when it is needed elsewhere on the system. The only way to manually > reclaim this memory is by writing 1 to /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches. " [...] > The point of the whole exercise is to get a better idea of free memory for > our employer. Does it make sense to do this for computing free memory? /proc/meminfo::MemAvailable was added for this purpose. See the doc text in Documentation/filesystem/proc.txt. It's an approximation, however, because this question is not easy to answer. Pages might be in various states and uses that can make them unreclaimable. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>