On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 04:46:40PM -0500, Theresa Kehoe wrote: > Here's a question: why does the memory information reported by 'top' > come out so differently from the memory information on the 'resources' > tab of the system monitor? (running 8.10 ubuntu) > > They are both showing 0 on swap (should be correct), but top shows > 2355632k used and 1006156k free out of a total of 3361788k. System > monitor shows 507.1MB used (or 15.4%). If I had to guess, I'd put my > money on system monitor (just booted up, not running much of anything > yet). But maybe not ... anyone know why the difference?
Probably the difference between memory being used for running processes (heap+stack) and memory being used for I/O buffers (disk, network). You can see a detailed breakdown by running the command free(1). It appears that top is using the totals including the buffers and cache and System Monitor is using the totals without buffers and cache. Given the prevalence of shared libraries, whose code segments are shared between programs while their data segments are not, how any program adds/subtracts these numbers is up to anyone's guess. In other words, these numbers are really only a guide. -- David Dooling http://www.politigenomics.com/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) Main page: http://www.cwelug.org To post: [email protected] To subscribe: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
