On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 04:34:45PM +0200, Wessel Dankers wrote:
> On 2002-05-16 13:57:44-0400, Michael Sinz wrote:
> > total used free shared buffers cached
> > Mem: 577396 567464 9932 0 0 233460
> > -/+ buffers/cache: 334004 243392
> > Swap: 2048276 1964 2046312
>
> Don't use the free utility, its parsing of /proc/meminfo is broken.
> Better to look at /proc/meminfo directly.
My free is just about exactly what /proc/meminfo says.
/proc/meminfo isn't correct all the time. Many times it has shown what
basically appears to be a memory leak, when in reality the memory was
allocated and /proc/meminfo just doesn't show it.
I think either /proc/meminfo needs to be changed to include full
information, or the free and other utilities need to use /proc/slabinfo.
When I exit a full X session, I often have 100MB or more memory missing.
/proc/meminfo does not show this, so free's parsing doesn't really
matter: even done correctly, it would be wrong.
But looking in /proc/slabinfo, you can sometimes see where the memory is.
I can run a memory-eater to ask for slightly more memory than what I
have as real RAM, and that missing memory mostly comes back.
Accounting in the current Linux kernels needs improvement, IMHO.
--
UNIX/Perl/C/Pizza__________________________________shannon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
|