Jeffrey Ross wrote:
I believe I have a memory leak someplace on the system, over several
days I watch the used memory slowly climb and eventually the system
starts swapping
How much does it swap?
New users often ask about memory use, since "free" memory will under
normal conditions, shrink toward 0.
Example output from the "free" command:
$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1555352 1518588 36764 0 61120 855200
-/+ buffers/cache: 602268 953084
Swap: 1044216 848 1043368
In that example, my workstation with 1.5GB of RAM has just 36M of free
memory. However, swap barely has anything at all in it, less than 1M.
The key is the memory used for write buffers and cached files. Files,
when accessed, will be stored in memory as long as nothing else is
contending for the space. That way, when they're accessed again, they
don't need to be read off of the disk. This boosts performance, and
decreases wear on the disk and power consumption.
To simplify the math, "free" prints a second line which shows memory
use, but doesn't count cached files. That line, in the example, shows
that ~600M is used by applications, and ~950M is free memory.
