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Hi everyone!
free is reporting my memory wrong after doing some rsyncing (-> disk cache is filled with some stuff)
[root@bigbrain ~]# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1610 472 1138 0 2 21
-/+ buffers/cache: 448 1162
Swap: 99 0 99
It says that allmost all of the used ram is actually used by processes and not for buffers/cache. But in fact it isn't! Much of the 448 "used w/o buffers/cache" can be used when a process needs much memory:
I started an interactive python session and aquired 1.4G of memory by some things like a=[0]*100000000; b=[0]*1000000; ...
After the python process is terminated (and the swap is cleared by swapoff/swapon) the figures look like
[root@bigbrain alex]# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1610 113 1497 0 0 8
-/+ buffers/cache: 104 1506
Swap: 99 0 99
which seems reasonable again.
Why is free reporting that memory as used in the second line (-/+ buffers/cache) when it really is just part of the cache?
To make it perfectly clear: I don't have any unexplained out-of-memory-errors and don't seem to really miss some of my memory, it is just reported in a way i do not understand (and in fact consider wrong in particular) even after looking at the thousands of sites like http://www.linuxatemyram.com/
Greetings
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