memory usage

[drew at drewtaylor.com (Drew Taylor)]

I wasn't so worried about "free" memory since I knew that it was available 
upon demand anyway. But I was curious if anyone knows the difference 
between "buffers" and "cached" memory? Is the buffers number the number of 
memory buckets, and cached the actual RAM used by these buckets?

At 10:55 AM 5/2/02 -0400, David Kramer wrote:
>On Thu, 2 May 2002, Drew Taylor wrote:
>
> > I'm running a kernel 2.4.2-2 (stock from RH 7.1) and am wondering what is
> > the difference between buffers and cached memory? I added 128MB and was
> > surprised to see so little memory free, even knowing that Linux does
> > aggressive caching.
> >
> > [drew at nephi]$ cat /proc/meminfo
> >          total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
> > Mem:  195735552 194052096  1683456        0 13651968 122585088
> > Swap: 205590528   290816 205299712
> > MemTotal:       191148 kB
> > MemFree:          1644 kB
> > MemShared:           0 kB
>
>Linux, as well as most versions of UNIX, take whatever memory they think
>the system can spare and use it for disk cache.  It's not really "used" in
>that it is not allocated to a userspace program.  Even though you only
>have 1644K real memory free, you can allocate much more than that, because
>as the system needs more memory it will take blocks of it out of service
>as disk cache and allocate it to the user.

======================================================================
Drew Taylor                     JA[P|m_p]H
http://www.drewtaylor.com/      Just Another Perl|mod_perl Hacker
mailto:drew at drewtaylor.com      *** God bless America! ***
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