Thursday, 13 January 2011

Linux Ate My RAM - Help!

Help! Linux ate my Memory. Did it indeed?
I was curious where my memory had gone because, when I fired up a terminal and typed the command -

$ free -m

I got the following output.

total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem: 882 843 38 0 86 424
-/+ buffers/cache: 332 549
Swap: 0 0 0

From a total of 882 MB, 843 MB has been used leaving only a measly 38 MB free for my use. How is that possible ?

Well, I stumbled upon an interesting website which explains in detail just this conundrum.

The website is (and you might have guessed it right!) linuxatemyram.com. And after reading through the website, I figured out that the whole thing is just a play of words. What you consider free is indeed free, but Linux chooses to call it 'used' because this memory is both used for something and at same time available for applications. Since your and Linux's terminology differs, you think you are low on RAM when you're not.Get it ?

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