I've noticed that my Linux system often has a noticeable amount of Dirty Memory, as reported by KDE System Monitor
What does this Dirty Memory stands for? What is causing these values, and how can I deal with this (should I even bother)?
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I think it has something to do with cache. Data expected to be written to a storage device that hasn't been yet is considered "dirty".– user772515Apr 26, 2018 at 16:24
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Inact_dirty: Dirty means "might need writing to disk or swap." Takes more work to free. Examples might be files that have not been written to yet. They are not written to memory too soon in order to keep the I/O down. For instance, if you are writing logs, it might be better to wait until you have a complete log ready before sending it to disk. - RHEL– RamhoundApr 26, 2018 at 17:03
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1 Answer
'Dirty' memory is memory representing data on disk that has been changed but has not yet been written out to disk. Among other things, it includes:
- Memory containing buffered writes that have not been flushed to disk yet.
- Regions of memory mapped files that have been updated but not written out to disk yet.
- Pages that are in the process of being written to swap space but have changed since the system started writing them to swap space.
Having a few MB of dirty memory is normal on any reasonably busy system, and even spikes up to a few hundred MB are not unusual. The only time to really be worried about it is if it's consistently very high, which is usually a sign that your disks are a performance bottleneck for your system.
answered Apr 26, 2018 at 19:37
