Very Computer

by **tvn198** » Sun, 22 Jul 2001 18:00:41

I see alot of mentioning and explaining about the command top but can't
quite figure it out yet ...
here's what my top looks like --- please explain it to me - thanks

59 processes: 57 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 0.5% user, 0.5% system, 0.0% nice, 98.8% idle
Mem: 126328K av, 121940K used, 4388K free, 0K shrd, 6744K buff
Swap: 152576K av, 51376K used, 101200K free 53932K cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
6735 root 14 0 203M 179M 5164 R 0.3 145.2 12:53 X

For example, does it mean it is using 121 mb / 128 mb available ram ?
what's buff ? cached ?

And it seems like X is taking 145.2 % of my memory ... however, the
system still run very well , I once had 1 X session run for 20 days
straight without having problem .. that makes me more curious about this.

by **Peter T. Breue** » Sun, 22 Jul 2001 18:52:41

> 59 processes: 57 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
> CPU states: 0.5% user, 0.5% system, 0.0% nice, 98.8% idle
> Mem: 126328K av, 121940K used, 4388K free, 0K shrd, 6744K buff
> Swap: 152576K av, 51376K used, 101200K free 53932K cached
> PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
> 6735 root 14 0 203M 179M 5164 R 0.3 145.2 12:53 X
> For example, does it mean it is using 121 mb / 128 mb available ram ?

It doesn't say that. It says MB, not mb (MegaByte, not millibit).But
what do you mean? I don't see any non-english words in your senetence.
It means that it is using 121MB of the 126MB available. I presume
the remaining 2MB of your 128MB is used by the kernel.

Quote:> what's buff ? cached ?

Buffered. Cached. What is your question? Buffered is on the way out,
cached is on the way in. Both will be discarded if and when the kernel
needs memory for processes.

Quote:> And it seems like X is taking 145.2 % of my memory ... however, the

So? And where do you get that statistic from! Are you summing separate
threads or something? Both you and your mother live in your house, and
I daresay you use a total of 145% of it!

Quote:> system still run very well , I once had 1 X session run for 20 days
> straight without having problem .. that makes me more curious about this.

Look .. if you are curious about memory management in linux, then go
and read up on it! The documents in the kernel Documentation directory
might be a good start, but surely you should check the ususal suspects
(the FAQs) first? You'll find many of your questions answered.

Peter

by **muppe** » Sun, 22 Jul 2001 21:38:50

Quote:> For example, does it mean it is using 121 mb / 128 mb available ram ?
> what's buff ? cached ?

Probably - but you need to carefully define "using". In this case it
probably means "I'm handling this much of it for you". The ~7Mb remaining is
probably core which cannot be messed with.

Quote:> And it seems like X is taking 145.2 % of my memory ... however, the
> system still run very well.

Not a problem - remember you have swap space - probably sat in it's own
partition, happily pretending to be really slow access memory. Memory
management probably loaded up a whole bundle of X, realised you were only
using a small amount of it, and dumped the rest to swap in case you wanted
it later.

Apparently there was a large change in the way memory management is
performed between kernels 2.2.x and 2.4.x - there will be documentation on
it probably in /usr/src/doc or similar.

HTH.

PS: "man top" or "info top" would probably be a good start.

Very Computer

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