After some memory problems on a server, I started to look into it: what do all those number in the output of free
actually mean? And, I found the answer in a forum:
bf@tbwb-dt-bf:~> free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3978 3848 130 0 28 1985 -/+ buffers/cache: 1834 2144 Swap: 2055 0 2055
What do these numbers mean? Well, the first row is your physical RAM. That is, what is actually in chips on the motherboard of your computer. And, of that, the command shows what is actually exactly in use. In applications, buffers, caches, kernel, etc. (In this case in megabytes, because of the -m
option with free.)
But, as we all know, Linux loves to cache everything. All that is read and received gets a place in the buffer memory. Most the time, there is more than enough memory available to do that. Those are the ‘buffers’ and ‘cached’ numbers. They really are in use in the system’s memory, but when an application needs RAM, the kernel will release those buffers. And the result of that, is in the line below. Following schematic shows how it works:
bf@tbwb-dt-bf:~> free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: T U F S B C -/+ buffers/cache: U-B-C F+B+C Swap: TS US FS
The numbers in the second row are the used and free RAM for applications. ‘used’ minus ‘buffers’ minus ‘cached’ is in use by applications; ‘free’ plus ‘buffers’ plus ‘cached’ is available for new ones. And if the kernel runs out of that, the OOM-killer steps in. But I won’t discuss that further here.
0 Comments