From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705) Description of problem: Output from free -m: [root@r2pgardel log]# free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 2007 1931 75 0 132 1631 -/+ buffers/cache: 167 1839 Swap: 4000 0 4000 This during low load and 1 user. Why is the percantage of free memory so smal? Tried to tune the memory usage with via the /etc/sysctl.conf file. I´ve succeeded in raising the inactive_clean_percent to 40 but when I try to change bdflush with the following line in sysctl.conf: vm.bdflush="30 700 0 0 400 2500 70 40 0" It still states the default values after reboot. Even if I issue the command sysctl -p it persists! Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: N/A Expected Results: Freeing memory. Additional info:
The value of free memory varies between 50 - 100 MB. This is unchanged if I start a lot of applications so the kernel (2.4.21- 27.0.1.ELsmp) seems to free memory as it should. I´m still a bit worried about the low memory avialable...
Hi - this question gets asked a lot. "Free memory" is found in two places... there's some on the 'Mem: ' line and some more on the "+/- buffers/cache: " If you look at the free on the top line it looks alarming. The free on second line is less so. The Linux kernel reserves most unused memory for use as internal buffers and filesystem buffer cache. The first line reports: Total: how much physical memory the machine has Used: amount of used (kernel + user + buffers + cache) memory Free: how much unallocated memory Shared: how much is shared via shm, mmap, shlibs, etc. Buffers: how much is preallocated to unused kernel buffers Cached: how much is preallocated to unsued filesystem buffer cache The second line reports: Used: amount of system memory that is actually in use this is the first line 'used' - (buffers + cache) Free: amount of memory that isn't actually busy this is the first line 'free' + buffers + cache. From your free listing I see that you have 1839M of your 2007M free. You're doing great! No need to worry. Feel better?
Much better thank you! Feels much better to know that my mem is some where safe. ;-)