OT, determining real amount of free RAM

[Littlefield, Tyler]

hello:
Your actual line is:
- -/+ buffers/cache:       1263       1694
the 1263 is what's used, 1694 is what's open.
Your system will page out things that it doesn't need, so this can be 
loewr than you'd think.
HTH,
On 5/2/2012 3:55 PM, Gregory Nowak wrote:
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> Hi all,
>
> I've been wondering this for a while, and figured I'd ask here. How
> does one determine the amount of free RAM on a gnu/linux system? If I
> run "free -m" on one of my machines right after boot, I get something
> like:
>
> total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:          2957       2933         24          0         78
> 1590
> - -/+ buffers/cache:       1263       1694
> Swap:          925          0        925
>
> Here's what I'm getting at. First, I know what runs on this box, and
> this machine starts up with a limited amount of programs running, and
> pretty much stays like that as long as it remains powered up (running
> ps confirms this). What this machine starts with should take up about
> 1480 megs of RAM according to my calculations. Ok, let's add 100 megs
> extra for the system itself, and to make sure I've really accounted
> for what runs on this box. That would come out to about 1580 megs of
> RAM used, let's round up to 1600. I have also confirmed that if I
> physically pull a gig of RAM out, the machine will still run
> everything without heavy use of swap.
>
> Second, if the machine stays up for 24 hours or longer, the amount of
> free RAM doesn't change much, but a few megs of swap is used. I assume
> this is for processes which haven't been used in a while. So, why am I
> seeing something around 20 megs free, instead of something around a
> gig? To put it another way, if I wanted to run this machine with a
> minimum amount of RAM how would I figure out how much I really need?
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Greg
>
>
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