memory /swap question: possibly also tmpfs question

[Terry Klarich]

Hi Cheryl and others:

Linux and other Unix operating systems devide  memory (core) into pages.  Most unix's use 4096 bytes (4k) page size.  These memory
pages are used for various things like io buffers, data segments, code segments ...  There is also pages on the active and inactive
lists.  The active list are the pages which the kernel is using.  While the inactive list are pages which are no longer being used;
but, have not been reclaimed and put on the free list.

So, in short, there is a lot going on as far as memory management.  The free memory value is not as important as you would think.
To see if your system is memory starved or not, use vmstat.  Look at the si and so  columns.  This will tell you how hard your system
is working to provide memory.  These values indicate how much data per second is being written and read from swap.

Terry