RE: [suse-amd64] memory problem with suse 9.2
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 ;-). -- William A. Mahaffey III Huntsville, Al.
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.
William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
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.).
This is not a problem as explained above, Linux assigns a good slice of memory to be available as kernel buffers and it's released as needed. You'd only need to worry if you see a OOM (out of memory) message which should only be a kernel problem unless you have too low a swap and you can add a swapfile at any time to increase the amount of swap available. Some kernels going back several months experienced OOM conditions, but they were fixed. barrabas:/usr/src # free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 502 493 9 0 34 96 -/+ buffers/cache: 362 140 Swap: 1004 403 600 Nothing wrong here, I really have 34+9=43M available out of 512M. If you've come from the Windows world, it's a frightener - Where has all my memory gone? Answer - Nowhere. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Keen licensed Private Pilot Retired Large IBM and Sun Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux for all Computing Tasks
participants (3)
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Calkins, Dennis -
Sid Boyce -
William A. Mahaffey III