[PLUG] Question on the "top" command

Anthony Schlemmer aschlemm at attbi.com
Thu Jul 18 17:17:59 UTC 2002


What's interesting is you say you have 256MB of memory but according to 
"top" on the "Mem:" line you have approximately 123.7MB of physical 
memory available not anywhere close to the 256MB of memory you say you 
have installed. The kernel uses some of that memory so that's why the 
amount available is less that what's installed but you should see a 
value well over 200000K as the amount of available memory on your 
system if you have 256MB installed. 

For example, on my system with 512MB of memory installed, "top" shows I 
have 513432K of physical memory available. Here's the output from "top" 
on my system:

Mem:   513432K av, 482480K used,  30952K free, 0K shrd, 43312K buff
Swap:  265064K av,  17484K used, 247580K free  216900K cached

You can also do a "cat /proc/meminfo" to see the memory usage on your 
system.

Tony
 
On Thursday 18 July 2002 09:46 am, Mike Witt wrote:

> Question on the "top" command (Red Hat 7.2)  Basically, what if
> anything, does the "Mem:" line actually mean?  On my system (with
> 256Meg of ram) it starts out with about 30Meg free, and after I've
> run for a while it looks something like:
>
> Mem:   126704K av, 120388K used,   6316K free, 756K shrd, 2056K buff 
> Swap:  522104K av,  57800K used, 464304K free  56796K cached
>
> The first time I run an app that sucks up a lot of memory, the "free"
> mem goes down, but then it *never* comes back up over 10Meg free
> until I reboot the system.  Am I actually looking at some kind of
> memory leak in the kernel, is this just an "artifact" of top?  (Or do
> I just not understand what "free" memory means?)
>
> -Mike
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-- 
Anthony Schlemmer
aschlemm at attbi.com






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