Re: Memory consumption on linux

[Jan Knutar <jk-lkml@sci.fi>]

On Tuesday 01 May 2007 22:31, Christian Schmidt wrote:

> And, how does process memory relate to system memory? Usually the sum
> of the resident memory (ps -o rss) is way off from the used memory
> displayed by free.

RSS has all the shared pages in it too.

> where you can see discrepancies in either direction, in one case 2G
> more free than resident, in the other case 60M less.

> Is there a way to get more detailed information on process and kernel
> memory usage? I assume that dm-crypto and software-raid use memory
> that does not show up anywhere.

Slab in /proc/meminfo, I guess. Lots of other values there too.The 
command slabtop -s c too.

> dynamips and vmware both mmap() the ram of the emulated machines
> (dynamips emulates cisco routers). Still, obviously the majority of
> the resident memory is "free", or rather "cached".

mmap() with a backing file is probably counted as "cached". mmap and 
brk() without backing files would probably be AnonPages 
in /proc/meminfo...