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playdafunkimuzic

Member

Registered: 2008-10-25

Posts: 220

How do you read 'top' output?

Can someone explain to me how to determine info from the 'top' command? What do the numbers indicate?

Mem:   4018500k total,  2930032k used,  1088468k free,   248776k buffers

brisbin33

Member

From: boston, ma

Registered: 2008-07-24

Posts: 1,796

Website

Re: How do you read 'top' output?

left to right:

you have ~4GB of total memory available
you have ~2.9GB in use right now
leaving ~1.1GB free
and ~0.25GB of what's in use is in buffers (which is also available if needed).

there's also probably some RAM in cache so you've probably got more than ~1.1GB available

you can compare this to the output of `free` to get a better picture.

# top's output
> top | grep ^Mem
Mem:   3977936k total,  3910816k used,    67120k free,   471124k buffers

# and free
> free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3977936    3910676      67260          0     471144    2690976
-/+ buffers/cache:     748556    3229380
Swap:      2048276        252    2048024

3229280 or ~3.2GB (in my case) is the accurate measure of free RAM

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buttons

Member

From: NJ, USA

Registered: 2007-08-04

Posts: 620

Re: How do you read 'top' output?

This wasn't your question exactly, but you may find htop (pacman -S htop) much easier to read.

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