Amit D Chaudhary wrote: > > Erik Mouw wrote: > > > On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 06:44:58PM +0200, Hilik Stein wrote: > >>i have a working system here, where i see that the amount of free memory > >>keeps dropping constantly, and never goes back up, i understood that it > >>could be that the memory was going into some memory caches, can someone > >>please explain how i can locate the missing memory ? > >> > > > > /proc/meminfo shows you (in Buffers and Cached), and you can also use > > the "free" utility. > > This is something even I am curious about given a linux system, what is > cached memory, buffer cache, network data cache? Also, over a few days > of running if the free memory reduces to a few MB (on a 256 MB system) > and the cached increases and then this state stays, what does this > implies kernel and mm behaviour is concerned? It implies that the programs that use the cached data should perform much better, since they will not have to perform disk reads to service page faults. Free memory is wasted memory; cached memory is a Good Thing. Note that cached pages that are up-to-date on disk are effectively free, since they can be immediately reclaimed as free pages if necessary. Cheers, -- Joe "I should like to close this book by sticking out any part of my neck which is not yet exposed, and making a few predictions about how the problem of quantum gravity will in the end be solved." --- Physicist Lee Smolin, "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity" -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ IRC Channel: irc.openprojects.net / #kernelnewbies Web Page: http://www.kernelnewbies.org/
