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Top Forums UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers Interpreting Linux's free command output Post 303010976 by drysdalk on Thursday 11th of January 2018 08:56:15 AM
Old 01-11-2018
Hello,

I would imagine that under normal circumstances the kernel would choose to allocate memory from the free pool first, before flushing out buffers, cache or anything else. It all depends precisely on what kind of memory the process is wanting to allocate and for what purpose, but in general memory which is totally unused would be used up first, and then when free memory fell below a certain threshold the system would most likely become more aggressive about freeing up cached memory for actual use by running processes.

In either case, so long as memory is available, a process will be able to use it, so where exactly it comes from is normally not something you need to worry about or consider. If a process needs memory and it's available by one means or another, the system will allocate it.
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TAU_TRACK_MEMORY_HEA(3) 				      TAU Instrumentation API					   TAU_TRACK_MEMORY_HEA(3)

NAME
TAU_TRACK_MEMORY_HEADROOM - Track the headroom (amount of memory for a process to grow) by periodically interrupting the program SYNOPSIS
C/C++: TAU_TRACK_MEMORY_HEADROOM(void); Fortran: TAU_TRACK_MEMORY_HEADROOM(void); DESCRIPTION
Tracks the amount of memory available for the process before it runs out of free memory on the heap. This call sets up a signal handler that is invoked every 10 seconds by an interrupt (this interval may be altered by using the TAU_SET_INTERRUPT_INTERVAL call). Inside the interrupt handler, TAU evaluates how much memory it can allocate and associates it with the callstack using the TAU context events (See TAU_REGISTER_CONTEXT_EVENT(3)). The user can vary the size of the callstack by setting the environment variable TAU_CALLPATH_DEPTH (default is 2). This call is useful on machines like IBM BG/L where no virtual memory (or paging using the swap space) is present. The amount of heap memory available to the program is limited by the amount of available physical memory. TAU executes a series of malloc calls with a granularity of 1MB and determines the amount of memory available for the program to grow. EXAMPLE
C/C++ : TAU_TRACK_MEMORY_HEADROOM(); Fortran : call TAU_TRACK_MEMORY_HEADROOM() SEE ALSO
TAU_TRACK_MEMORY(3), TAU_SET_INTERRUPT_INTERVAL(3), TAU_ENABLE_TRACKING_MEMORY_HEADROOM(3), TAU_DISABLE_TRACKING_MEMORY_HEADROOM(3), TAU_TRACK_MEMORY_HEADROOM_HERE(3) 08/31/2005 TAU_TRACK_MEMORY_HEA(3)
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