On 10/09/2020 13:12, Terry Coles wrote: > On Thursday, 10 September 2020 12:59:49 BST Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote: >> "free" should report physical "real" memory usage right? If I'm mistaken >> there it could explain the numbers. The NAS box had only 14M or 256M >> free earlier despite showing no process using that much memory. It >> usually only uses about 50M if memory serves. > Don't forget that the memory under cache is not really in use as such; it is > simply memory containing parked data from earlier processes. The OS will > free > that if it needs it. My machine has 8G of physical memory and free -h gives: > > terry@OptiPlex:~$ free -h > total used free shared buff/cache > available > Mem: 7.7Gi 6.2Gi 175Mi 73Mi 1.4Gi > 1.2Gi > Swap: 15Gi 1.4Gi 14Gi > > Viewing the memory in the graphical KDE System Monitor gives a totally > different answer with 6G used and no indication of cache. > > Even so, I find it interesting that you are using 21G out of 31, but > presumably > you are running lots of stuff.
No, I'm running almost nothing. Over time, even with nothing new opened, it goes up and up. This is ignoring the cache. On the NAS box, I just ran a python script to allocate a load of memory, enough to force it to use swap. I made two interesting discoveries: 1) It is compressing memory to save physical RAM. 2) When I do this and then kill the process, more memory is magically reported as free for a short time. My understanding is that this shouldn't be happening, so something is being misreported? Hamish
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
-- Next meeting: Online, Jitsi, Tuesday, 2020-10-06 20:00 Check to whom you are replying Meetings, mailing list, IRC, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk New thread, don't hijack: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk
