I've got an HP Microserver with 4 gig, running a pretty minimal LXDE desktop right next to me. It's primarily a web and small VM server. It's using Debian 7.2 Stable.
# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3840 3262 577 0 19 238
-/+ buffers/cache: 3005 834
Swap: 7628 12 7616
What I gather from this is that this is not the usual problem that frightens people of disk caches growing large. If I force the caches to drop, it only frees 100 meg or so, so I don't think that's the problem here.
What i'm trying to find out is what's using the 3 gigabytes.
# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 3932292 kB
MemFree: 919468 kB
Buffers: 2356 kB
Cached: 74220 kB
SwapCached: 1932 kB
Active: 201688 kB
Inactive: 44464 kB
Active(anon): 153004 kB
Inactive(anon): 24032 kB
Active(file): 48684 kB
Inactive(file): 20432 kB
Unevictable: 16 kB
Mlocked: 16 kB
SwapTotal: 7812088 kB
SwapFree: 7798840 kB
Dirty: 40 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 167800 kB
Mapped: 362992 kB
Shmem: 7412 kB
Slab: 43164 kB
SReclaimable: 10728 kB
SUnreclaim: 32436 kB
KernelStack: 3688 kB
PageTables: 14072 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 9778232 kB
Committed_AS: 1364204 kB
VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed: 2580308 kB
VmallocChunk: 34357040804 kB
HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB
AnonHugePages: 0 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
HugePages_Surp: 0
Hugepagesize: 2048 kB
DirectMap4k: 124480 kB
DirectMap2M: 3938304 kB
DirectMap1G: 0 kB
Having a look at /proc/meminfo
, adding up all of the Active/Inactive sections only comes out to about 1GB, leaving me with 2GB more unaccounted for. This also squares nicely with the output from top
and where I should subjectively be considering what's running on the system right now.
Some other posts suggested looking at the Slab:
number here, but that only is 43 megabytes.
Any idea where else I should be looking for this missing 2 gigabytes?
cat /proc/meminfo
wouldn't hurt either. As is you provide no real details so any answer would just be general information on what can consume memory on a Linux/Unix system.If I force the caches to drop, it only frees 100 meg or so, so I don't think that's the problem here.
. That only clears the relatively small amount of data under the cache heading as stated in the question, it does not free up the unaccounted for two gigabytes.