On Sunday 29 March 2009 10:34:41 Jon Clausen wrote:
On Sat, 28 Mar, 2009 at 23:11:52 +0100, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Saturday 28 March 2009 22:48:53 Chuck Payne wrote:
Does any one have a good script I can use, or can advise me on what is best practise for monitor memory.
In general I'd say that 'free' vs. 'used' memory is not nearly as important as whether or not the system is swapping.
Good point. Just remember that what you're looking for is not whether or not swap is used at all, since linux will swap out areas of memory that haven't been used for a long time, to make room for more buffers and cache. This is normally a good thing which leads to improved performance. It's only a problem if the system starts running out of physical RAM so it needs to swap out areas of memory which actually are used actively. This is the first step on the road to thrashing, which can kill your system. This only happens when the "free" value runs low though, which is why it is a good idea to monitor it. Especially since you want to be warned before the system runs into trouble, not when it's already too late.
If there's enough physical RAM to keep all relevent 'somethings' in memory, then everything is fine regardless of how many percent it takes up. If not, then the system has to swap between physical memory and swapspace on disk, which carries a performance penalty.
Actually, I'd say that if you have X amount of RAM in the system, and you have applications running that take up X amount of RAM, then you wouldn't have a performant system. Sure, it wouldn't be swapping, but there would be absolutely no disk caching or buffering, and this would have a pretty big impact, I'd bet. Anders -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org