Memory Usage break-down

[Jordan]

This is a neat little tip I just learned. If you want to see a breakdown of how your system memory is being used there is a file you can cat. The file is located at /proc/meminfo.

Run:

# cat /proc/meminfo

Results:

MemTotal:      2010416 kB
MemFree:        319872 kB
Buffers:        322192 kB
Cached:         656664 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:         928904 kB
Inactive:       620452 kB
HighTotal:     1113856 kB
HighFree:        62416 kB
LowTotal:       896560 kB
LowFree:        257456 kB
SwapTotal:     2096472 kB
SwapFree:      2096472 kB
Dirty:            8360 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
AnonPages:      570464 kB
Mapped:          15756 kB
Slab:           124304 kB
PageTables:       8432 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
CommitLimit:   3101680 kB
Committed_AS:  1612408 kB
VmallocTotal:   114680 kB
VmallocUsed:      3576 kB
VmallocChunk:   110368 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
HugePages_Rsvd:      0
Hugepagesize:     4096 kB

You can see how and where your memory is being utilized.

[John]

Thats one of the great things about Linux, everything is a file. There is a multitude of other useful information that is found within files in the proc directory as well.

[Hektor]

Thats one of the great things about Linux, everything is a file. There is a multitude of other useful information that is found within files in the proc directory as well.

Oh? What other information can we extract?

[John]

Well, if you cd to your proc directory type ls, all the numbered directories refer to your process id's. You can cd into those directors and get information about each process, for example the cmdline file displays the command used to run that process. Just look through the proc directory, the file names are pretty discriptive.

[Jordan]

Thanks for the info John!

[SexYLinuX]

So you can cd into the processes?

[mop]

What other information can I get?