Hi All,
I have my desktop running FC5 (kernel 2.6.17-1.2174_FC5). It's been up
for the last 31 days. What I observe is that it gets sluggish over time.
Even after closing a lot of apps (mostly gnome-term's and firefox) I see
that opening of any new app, or for that matter even maximizing an
existing one, causes *heavy* disk activity (as shown by gkrellm).This
indicates a lot of swapping happening, I think?
So, I thought I'd have a look at how much of memory is left free in the
system. And this is where I get confused a little! Does the free mem
(as in the amount available to apps) also include the amount available
on swap and buffer cache?
Here's how the mem looks when I'm in the "sluggish" state...
$> free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 495 479 16 0 0 40
-/+ buffers/cache: 438 57
Swap: 1027 518 509
This shows, I have 16M free on the RAM, and 57M free on the
buffer cache. Why does this cache have "free" pages? This only
caches recently read data, right? What does "free" mean here?
A more detailed mem snapshot...
$> cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 507516 kB
MemFree: 14304 kB
Buffers: 1176 kB
Cached: 40484 kB
SwapCached: 90864 kB
Active: 372800 kB
Inactive: 5508 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 507516 kB
LowFree: 14304 kB
SwapTotal: 1052248 kB
SwapFree: 526124 kB
Dirty: 172 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
Mapped: 371016 kB
Slab: 44756 kB
CommitLimit: 1306004 kB
Committed_AS: 2049908 kB
PageTables: 6752 kB
VmallocTotal: 516088 kB
VmallocUsed: 4712 kB
VmallocChunk: 510980 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
Hugepagesize: 4096 kB
I also checked "dmesg" to see if OOM killer was ever invoked. It wasn't.
How do I calculate how much free mem my system *exactly* has (including
swap/cache/free on RAM)?
Thanks,
-mandeep
