From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: by rproxy.gmail.com with SMTP id c51so1459514rne for ; Tue, 05 Apr 2005 03:50:05 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 10:50:05 +0000 From: RichardR Reply-To: RichardR Subject: The using of memory buffer/cache and free Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: Hi all, I just want to wipe out some doubts in my knowledges about how processes and kernel use memory buffer/cache and memory free. My doubt is, when I run the first time my machine and when I run "free"... it shows me corrret numbers. no memory leaks on view... Now when I try to run some process, like a simple rsync transfer which takes some time to finish...I just can see that my "free" goes down, which can be explained with the rsync activities... after some minutes...the rsync ended and what I can still see is this: root@4[root]# free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 2075428 2051948 23480 0 10872 1965908 -/+ buffers/cache: 75168 2000260 Swap: 0 0 0 -- Memory free is not flushed out even after an "update" or "sync" and cached is highly stored. Now when I want to know the total load of memory used by running processes, I can find only 151320 bytes used! and my total memory is 2Gb, the rest is on cached... root@4[root]# ps auwwx | sort -n +4 | awk 'BEGIN{a=0}($5 > 0) { a+=$5; print $5,$11 }END{print a}' | grep -v sort | tail +2 76 init 1564 grep 1628 /usr/sbin/automount 1752 tail 1920 awk 2512 ps 2572 /bin/sh 2572 /bin/sh 3108 /usr/sbin/sshd 3432 /bin/bash 3432 /bin/bash 3432 /bin/bash 3432 /bin/bash 3440 -bash 6076 sshd: 6700 icewm 6700 -bash 6700 -bash 6736 -bash 9944 xterm 9944 xterm 10252 xterm 26248 XFree86 151320 my question is: is it normal that such a process can demande such memory free and then cached by the kernel without being flushed after used? Thanks guys in advance for your lights... Cheers -- Richard R. IT Soft/System Engineer CNRS/IN2P3/LPNHE Jussieu - Paris VI -- -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: aart@kvack.org