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[ale] Memory "free" vs what is truly available
- Subject: [ale] Memory "free" vs what is truly available
- From: cfowler at outpostsentinel.com (cfowler)
- Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 14:47:23 -0400
- In-reply-to: <[email protected]>
- References: <1179339273.5200.20.camel@cfowler-laptop> <[email protected]>
On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 14:35 -0400, David Tomaschik wrote:
>
> Buffers and cache will be dropped immediately if the kernel needs the
> RAM. The 2nd line in the "Free" column is the memory available should
> a
> process need it. The 1st line is what is truly unused (the kernel
> keeps
> a little for immediate use).
So take the Free from the second line and determine the percentage of
total. If it is less than 5% then that would be a problem.
I've ran into conditions where I was truly using up most memory and swap
usage was low. The kernel was still killing processes. I guess in that
case there were many pages that could not be swapped out.