Derek Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
>> Mem: 64524288 41836544 22687744 25706496 9859072 15622144
...
>I just had a discussion about that very topic with one of our kernel
>weenies last week. You're almost perfect, if I understood him
>correctly... Shared refers to the number of bytes being used by more than
>one process (not necessarily shared libraries, can also be text pages of a
>program with multiple instances). Buffers refer to I/O buffers (any
>buffered I/O), while cached refers specifically to disk buffer cache.
>The numbers do not add up to 100%, and will overlap.
That's pretty much what the terms would lead me to think. The "disk
cache" would be an area of memory that holds the same information as
part of the disk. Any disk I/O buffers would qualify as cache. They
hold the same data as the disk, either because it was just read from
disk, or else some program has told the kernel to write it to disk.
(The kernel might not have gotten around to it yet.) Other sorts of
I/O buffers, as for network I/O, would not count as cache. Which
would make me expect that "cached" should be a strict subset of
"buffers". Yet, in the above case, "cached" is larger. What am I
missing?
- Jim Van Zandt
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