Re: Top Memory Usage Stats on RedHat 9

From: Michael Heiming (michael+USENET_at_www.heiming.de)
Date: 09/28/03 

Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2003 09:11:27 +0200

Mike <mike@kamloopsbc.com> wrote:
> 42 processes: 41 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
> CPU0 states: 0.0% user 0.0% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait
> 100.0% idle
> CPU1 states: 2.0% user 0.0% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait
> 98.0% idle
> Mem: 2063680k av, 1857216k used, 206464k free, 0k shrd,
> 30136k buff
> 106492k actv, 287868k in_d, 17652k in_c
> Swap: 2303744k av, 0k used, 2303744k free
> 1751204k cached

> The stats from running top show that the system has 200MB of the 2GB
> RAM free, while only 100MB is active and the rest is "in_d" (dirty?).

Refers AFAIK to the memory segment used, try for the full story:

http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/KernelAnalysis-HOWTO-7.html

Anyway could you post the output of:

$ top --version
$ rpm -qi procps

Never saw top outputting iowait on Linux.

> The machine has pretty much nothing (no x or anything) running other
> than sshd, sendmail, etc.

> Anyway, when this RAM reports being mostly used, and nothing is going
> on, is this something we should worry about or somehow 'clean'? On a
> similar system with Solaris 8, the RAM usage while under full
> production is much lower than the RedHat machine with nothing going
> on....

No problem, Linux uses all available RAM very effectively caching/buffering
almost everything, RAM will be freed immediately if needed, take a look
at the output of "free" or/and run "xosview". 

-- 
Michael Heiming
Remove +SIGNS and www. if you expect an answer, sorry for 
inconvenience, but I get tons of SPAM

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