Hi Guys,
Environment:
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (x86_64)
VERSION = 11
PATCHLEVEL = 1
Recently one of our Sentinel server became very sluggish to access and its services stopped responding, we have to do a restart of the services in order to get our server back and running.
While the server was unresponsive I was able to run, free -m, and this is what the command showed me:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 15956 15866 89 0 434 10051
-/+ buffers/cache: 5380 10576
Swap: 2047 46 2001
Does it mean that, used memory is 10051 and only free memory here is 89?
What is the meaning of -/+ buffers? It shows it has about 10576 memory free?
Any details? Pointers?
Regards,
Dinesh
It’s one of the better covered subjects out there… and easily explained as “Linux tries to use as much of your physical memory as possible, i.e. as buffers and for caching - and will give the latter two up on application demand”. That’s why there’s not much free memory, but much available to applications when adjusted by the amount currently used for caching/buffering.