Re: kernel is using 50M of memory
brian moore <bem@cmc.net> writes:
> On Thu, Dec 28, 2000 at 12:44:27PM -0700, Cameron Matheson wrote:
> > Hey,
> >
> > I was looking at the memory usage (gmemusage, and /proc/meminfo),
> > and I was noticing that 'linux' was using nearly 50m of memory. I
> > was rather disturbed, and wondering why
>
> Um, /proc/meminfo doesn't say how much the kernel is using (well, not
> directly, anyway -- you can derive it by subtracting how much RAM is in
> your system from the 'MemTotal' portion).
>
> Why do you think it's using 50M? Sure -you- aren't using it?
I'm a bit confused about memory usage on my system, where I am running
the 2.4.0-test12 kernel. Similar things seem to be happening with
test5, the only other kernel I've used recently.
In addition to the 3.7M difference between the memory I have installed
(128M) and the MemTotal value, there is also a lot of memory being
used that isn't allocated to any processes that I can find. For
example, below is the output of top which shows all the processes I
had running at that time (I had killed most things). Notice that mem
used + swap used - buff - cached is about 16M, even though if you add
up the sizes of the processes you get only 8M or so. The output of
free confirms this. Is this normal? What is using this 8M? The
kernel already has 3.7M reserved! And when I when I run the program
gmemusage, it says that "linux" is using between 4 and 8M.
Anyone have any explanations?
Thanks,
Dan
This is with 2.4.0-test12 after running for about a day:
2:02pm up 17:19, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00
17 processes: 16 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 1.1% user, 87.2% system, 0.5% nice, 11.2% idle
Mem: 127320K av, 78360K used, 48960K free, 0K shrd, 1864K buff
Swap: 128516K av, 244K used, 128272K free 60008K cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
3 root 18 0 0 0 0 SW 0 94.7 0.0 891:41 kapm-idled
12802 root 12 0 1500 1500 756 R 0 0.9 1.1 0:00 top
1 root 9 0 512 508 448 S 0 0.0 0.3 0:09 init
2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0 0.0 0.0 0:00 keventd
4 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0 0.0 0.0 0:08 kswapd
5 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0 0.0 0.0 0:00 kreclaimd
6 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0 0.0 0.0 0:01 bdflush
7 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0 0.0 0.0 0:03 kupdate
161 root 9 0 744 744 616 S 0 0.0 0.5 0:03 syslogd
163 root 9 0 1032 1028 436 S 0 0.0 0.8 0:00 klogd
351 root 10 0 1420 1420 1064 S 0 0.0 1.1 0:00 bash
12784 root 9 0 480 480 420 S 0 0.0 0.3 0:00 getty
12785 root 9 0 480 480 420 S 0 0.0 0.3 0:00 getty
12786 root 9 0 480 480 420 S 0 0.0 0.3 0:00 getty
12787 root 9 0 480 480 420 S 0 0.0 0.3 0:00 getty
12788 root 9 0 480 480 420 S 0 0.0 0.3 0:00 getty
12803 root 10 0 644 644 524 S 0 0.0 0.5 0:00 less
free:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 127320 77552 49768 0 1864 60012
-/+ buffers/cache: 15676 111644
Swap: 128516 244 128272
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