[Novalug] Interesting memory usage on big server

Kevin Dwyer kevin@pheared.net
Wed Sep 5 14:16:45 EDT 2007


On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 02:02:59PM -0400, Ben Creitz wrote:
> Red Hat's response:
> "I have talked to a senior engineer to confirm this, and he said that
> your situation is fine. The way that memory gets dealt with in Linux
> is that when a program / data gets referenced, it gets put into
> memory. That stays there even after the program is closed, so that the
> next time the program is opened, it opens quickly. The data stays in
> memory until memory is full, and then once that happens, memory starts
> getting cleaned up."

That's what is measured by the other columns output by free/vmstat (i.e.
cached, buffers).  The memory isn't technically free, but it's
available.

-kpd



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