Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Understanding memory usage with top

If you type "top" on the console,  you will see similar information

Mem:  12299804k total,  1505328k used, 10794476k free,   196024k buffers

How do you interpret the information especially the buffer? The above server has 12GB of RAM
  1. About 200Mbytes of memory is in the buffer. This buffering is to speed up disk access by caching written data in memory and reading in more than what we need in anticipation of the next week. If the memory is for more important requirements such as applications, it will be released immediately.

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