Message-ID: <471C75E7.2070400@draigBrady.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:05:27 +0100
From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?P=E1draig_Brady?= <P@draigBrady.com>
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To: "Ravinandan Arakali (rarakali)" <rarakali@cisco.com>
CC: Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Question about free/used memory on Linux
References: <FA6FB5FA4DA6BF4386D129273B2E3EC3024B847B@xmb-sjc-214.amer.cisco.com>
In-Reply-To: <FA6FB5FA4DA6BF4386D129273B2E3EC3024B847B@xmb-sjc-214.amer.cisco.com>
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Ravinandan Arakali (rarakali) wrote:
> Hi kernel gurus,
> I am trying to find out the memory that's used on my linux box.
> I find that there are quite a few confusing metrics. How do
> I find out the "true" used memory ?
> 
> 1. For eg. "free -m" shows free memory (excluding buffers/caches) 
> as 308 MB while I can see(from "df" output) that the the tmpfs 
> partitions take up about 400 MB. So, does "free -m" not consider 
> the tmpfs partitions ?
> 
> 2. I try to add up RSS field of all processes reported by
> "ps aux" command. But is it true that this would be misleading
> in that, shared memory used by, say 2 processes would show
> up twice here although there's only one copy in memory. Also
> does this consider the fact that there's only one copy
> of shared libraries ?

Have a look at this script so show RAM used by programs:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ps_mem.py

Note to display totals you will need this patch applied:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/13/1224

P?draig.
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