off-topic -> memory usage

David Collier from_busybox_maillist at dexdyne.com
Wed Feb 2 15:33:00 UTC 2011


I'd love to find a better place to ask Linux ( as opposed to bbox )
questions - but everyone is so helpful here I'm taking advantage.

If anyone knows of a helpful, friendly Linux mailist which I should be
using instead, please do point me to it!

-----------------------------------------------
I have an embedded box with no swap file which is running about 40
processes. I'm trying to work out how close to the limit of my memory I
am.

Here is what I see
                         initial      after
                         value        12 hours
                         soon after
                         power-on
                         --------     --------
        MemTotal:        30184 kB     30184 kB
        MemFree:         10912 kB      2048 kB
        Buffers:             0 kB         0 kB
        Cached:           6184 kB     14580 kB
        SwapCached:          0 kB         0 kB
        Active:          10392 kB     11320 kB
        Inactive:         3620 kB     11400 kB
        SwapTotal:           0 kB         0 kB
        SwapFree:            0 kB         0 kB
        Dirty:               0 kB         0 kB
        Writeback:           0 kB         0 kB
        AnonPages:        7848 kB      8160 kB
        Mapped:           2308 kB      2324 kB
        Slab:             3356 kB      3348 kB
        SReclaimable:     1112 kB       944 kB
        SUnreclaim:       2244 kB      2404 kB
        PageTables:        384 kB       396 kB
        Quicklists:         36 kB        64 kB
        NFS_Unstable:        0 kB         0 kB
        Bounce:              0 kB         0 kB
        WritebackTmp:        0 kB         0 kB
        CommitLimit:     15092 kB     15092 kB
        Committed_AS:    13780 kB     15068 kB
        VmallocTotal:   507904 kB    507904 kB
        VmallocUsed:       536 kB       536 kB
        VmallocChunk:   507344 kB    507344 kB

I see the memfree has dropped from 11 to 2 megabytes - but I also see
"cached"/"inactive" has taken up the slack.

So the question is - how close is this box to the OOM of doom - is the
inactive cached memory available for re-use if it's needed, or am I
really 2M from the drop?

Put it another way - what numbers above do I need to add/subtract to get
a useful value for "available memory"

David

        


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