Calkins, Dennis wrote:
Hi, What is the definitions of "the buffers" from the free display?
DESCRIPTION free displays the total amount of free and used physical and swap memory in the system, as well as the buffers used by the kernel.
That value keeps going up on my box. Is that like the VMALLOC pool ? Does this mean I have a memory leak?
-----Original Message----- From: William A. Mahaffey III [mailto:wam@HiWAAY.net] Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 12:23 PM To: suse-amd64@suse.com Subject: Re: [suse-amd64] memory problem with suse 9.2
Type in 'free -m' at a shell prompt & see what it says, the kernel sponges up RAM for buffers, but releases it when any app wants it, the free command will tell you about that .... YMMV & all that ;-).
I'm not a kernel hacker, can't provide much more detail than before. I posted a similar question a while back on another forum & got back the response I regurgitated last post. The key is to look at the 2nd line of the 'free -m' output, that one puts the buffer total back into free & tells you more accurately how much memory will be free for apps to use. If the output of the 'free -m' looks OK, I *think* you are AOK. This box (933 PIII, SuSE 8.2, 32 bit, 1 GB RAM) shows only about 30 MB free in top, but about 825 free from 'free -m' (KDE, 4 screens, several RXVT's open, etc.). -- William A. Mahaffey III Huntsville, Al.