Re: OT: free cmd is lying to me

[Holger Rauch <Holger.Rauch@heitec.de>]

Hi Jason!

Thanks a lot for your quick and informative reply!

On Sun, 2 Dec 2001, Jason Healy wrote:

> [...] 
> Looks right to me.  According to free, your system has 2GB of memory,
> most of which is 'used'.  However, looking at the next line, you'll
> see that 1.8GB of that is actually free for use, as the memory
> reported as being in use on the first line is mostly going towards
> buffers and cache (87172 for buffers, 1783556 for cache).  In fact,
> only 222,688 K are being used by actual processes on the system.

Ok. But where do the 600 MB of main memory that Oracle uses fit in
there? Are they reported as cached memory?
 
> Search this list archive for other e-mails on the free command; [...]

I tried to find a search engine at the Debian site. Is there any? (I'm
asking this because I don't see any other means to actually "search" this
list. All that I have found was some sorting functionality allowing the
user to sort mails posted to this list according to different criteria.

> [...] 
> How long did you run it for?  To use up 1.8GB of available RAM would
> take 15 minutes at the rate you described.  To exhaust all system
> memory (including the 4GB of swap) would take a total of 48 minutes.
> Did you wait that long?  

To be honest, no. Will try it for a longer period of time.

> Also, did you run the program as a normal
> user?  

Yes.

> The default ulimit probably would have clobbered the process
> before it could hog that much memory.

Thanks for that hint. Will check my ulimits.

> [...]  The second line of 'free' output, however, should change when
> you start new processes.

Thanks again. Will check that as well.

> Hope this helps.   

Yes, it surely does. As you probably have guessed, I wasn't sure on how to
interpret the output from free.

> If I've misread your question about free (i.e., you
> know about the buffer/cache thing),

No, I didn't know about it.

> then maybe I'm missing something
> about what's wrong with the system.

No, I don't think you are missing something.

Thanks again for your help!

Greetings,

	Holger