02-24-2017
Quote:
Originally Posted by
MadeInGermany
I hear this over and over again, from the Linux community. Always use 100%, a usage under 100% is wasted RAM, blabla.
This question is asked in the Red Hat forum so there is no doubt the OP is running Linux. The Linux kernel is designed to use all otherwise free RAM as cache with no penalties.
Note that under Unix and Linux, you can't really use 100%, the OS try hard to make sure minfree is left (min_free_kbytes on Linux), although minfree/min_free_kbytes are normally very small compared to the RAM size.
HP-UX might still has an problem freeing buffer cache memory but that's a design issue that should have been fixed if not already. Another System V implementation, Solaris, did it 17 years ago. On Solaris, the cache memory is reported as free memory and is freed almost instantly. See
Understanding Memory Allocation and File System Caching in OpenSolaris (Richard McDougall's Weblog)
On the other hand, RAM allocated in kernel buffers, regardless of the OS, is much more difficult to be retrieved for applications so tuning can be useful here, for example when ZFS is used.
Back to the OP issue, he is running on a virtualized environment and has no access to the hypervisor statistics. The hypervisor might well lie about actual resources available to the kernel so anything is possible.
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FREE(1) User Commands FREE(1)
NAME
free - Display amount of free and used memory in the system
SYNOPSIS
free [options]
DESCRIPTION
free displays the total amount of free and used physical and swap memory in the system, as well as the buffers and caches used by the ker-
nel. The information is gathered by parsing /proc/meminfo. The displayed columns are:
total Total installed memory (MemTotal and SwapTotal in /proc/meminfo)
used Used memory (calculated as total - free - buffers - cache)
free Unused memory (MemFree and SwapFree in /proc/meminfo)
shared Memory used (mostly) by tmpfs (Shmem in /proc/meminfo)
buffers
Memory used by kernel buffers (Buffers in /proc/meminfo)
cache Memory used by the page cache and slabs (Cached and SReclaimable in /proc/meminfo)
buff/cache
Sum of buffers and cache
available
Estimation of how much memory is available for starting new applications, without swapping. Unlike the data provided by the cache or
free fields, this field takes into account page cache and also that not all reclaimable memory slabs will be reclaimed due to items
being in use (MemAvailable in /proc/meminfo, available on kernels 3.14, emulated on kernels 2.6.27+, otherwise the same as free)
OPTIONS
-b, --bytes
Display the amount of memory in bytes.
-k, --kibi
Display the amount of memory in kibibytes. This is the default.
-m, --mebi
Display the amount of memory in mebibytes.
-g, --gibi
Display the amount of memory in gibibytes.
--tebi Display the amount of memory in tebibytes.
--pebi Display the amount of memory in pebibytes.
--kilo Display the amount of memory in kilobytes. Implies --si.
--mega Display the amount of memory in megabytes. Implies --si.
--giga Display the amount of memory in gigabytes. Implies --si.
--tera Display the amount of memory in terabytes. Implies --si.
--peta Display the amount of memory in petabytes. Implies --si.
-h, --human
Show all output fields automatically scaled to shortest three digit unit and display the units of print out. Following units are
used.
B = bytes
K = kibibyte
M = mebibyte
G = gibibyte
T = tebibyte
P = pebibyte
If unit is missing, and you have exbibyte of RAM or swap, the number is in tebibytes and columns might not be aligned with header.
-w, --wide
Switch to the wide mode. The wide mode produces lines longer than 80 characters. In this mode buffers and cache are reported in two
separate columns.
-c, --count count
Display the result count times. Requires the -s option.
-l, --lohi
Show detailed low and high memory statistics.
-s, --seconds delay
Continuously display the result delay seconds apart. You may actually specify any floating point number for delay using either .
or , for decimal point. usleep(3) is used for microsecond resolution delay times.
--si Use kilo, mega, giga etc (power of 1000) instead of kibi, mebi, gibi (power of 1024).
-t, --total
Display a line showing the column totals.
--help Print help.
-V, --version
Display version information.
FILES
/proc/meminfo
memory information
BUGS
The value for the shared column is not available from kernels before 2.6.32 and is displayed as zero.
Please send bug reports to
<procps@freelists.org>
SEE ALSO
ps(1), slabtop(1), top(1), vmstat(8).
procps-ng 2016-06-03 FREE(1)