question about /proc/meminfo (Inactive Memory)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 06:51:33PM -0500, Dave Germiquet wrote:
> I'm using my system and I occasionally use the cat /proc/meminfo |
> grep Inactive to see how much memory I use.
> 
> I am guessing thats how much memory that I have available, however I
> have recently realized that Active/InActive memory doesn't equal up to
> MemTotal.
> 
> Not only that, but Buffers+Cached+MemFree doesn't equal Inactive memory

I think some of the cache or buffers may also inactive, but certainly
much of the buffers are probably active and in use by applications.
After all lots of I/O is buffered.

> If I would like to know if my system is running out of memory would I
> use MemFree+Cached+Buffers Or would I use the Inactive Memory?
> 
> If I should still use Inactive why are the results different?

I have no idea what exactly some of those values are or which should add
up to what.

I tend to use this though:

free|grep '^-'|awk '{print $3}'

That tells me how much of my memory is currently free.  Of course in
general as long as you aren't using swap space, you still have free
memory.

--
Len Sorensen
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