I have Red Hat 7.3 running on my server. I have disabled all my applications with the exception of one application from "Intel". I executed "free" command to check on the memory usage. I have 512 MB of RAM. The amount of "free" memory keeps reducing while the "buffers" count keeps increasing.
1. How do I track which process is responsible for creating additional buffers because of which the free memory is decreasing?
2. Do I have to be concerned when the free memory turns about to be too low?
3. Is there anything I can do to keep the memory usage in check?
Do not worry. Linux sees "free" memory and uses it for buffers and cache to make things run better; it actually works very hard to keep most of your memory in use, since that is how your system will run fastest. Look on the second line:
[rpaiz@apollo rpaiz]$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 44244 38072 6172 0 8148 17404
-/+ buffers/cache: 12520 31724
Swap: 131740 11360 120380
[rpaiz@apollo rpaiz]$Where it says "-/+ buffers/cache" is your real utilization. In the case of my small server, with only 48MB RAM total, it is actually using 12.5MB for real work (see the "12520" in the second row) and has used about 32MB (see the "31724" at the right) for buffers and cache to speed up the system. Any part of those 32MB will be reclaimed automatically at any time if you need it.
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
-- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
