On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 01:46:17AM +0200, Moloko Monyepao wrote:
> The lpar is intended to run a java based timesheet application using postgrel as its 
> database. The following is the output from "FREE"
>
> >linux141:/ # free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:        773612     768736       4876          0     161500     430968
> -/+ buffers/cache:     176268     597344
> Swap:       300072       1508     298564
> linux141:/

Yeesh. Overkill, overkill, overkill.

Looks like a 768M partition, and you're using more than 590M for
buffers and file cache. Is this app really that much of a hog?

The total column shows you how much you have available to be
allocated. The used column tells you in total how much you have used
for any purpose. used + free should equal total.

The shared column is just that; pages shared between processes. The
buffers and cached columns tell you how much of the total is allocated
to buffers and file cache.  used - (buffers + cached) - free tells you
how much storage your application is actually using.

In this case, your application is using about 176M. The rest of your
RAM is being used for dirty file buffers and cached data. This is not
a good use of expensive zSeries RAM.

> Please help me on how can I interpret this info. Does it mean I
> still have a lot of memory left according to "FREE"command

It means that more than 2/3 of the resources you've allocated to this
LPAR are currently being used for buffers and file cache. You should seriously
consider reducing the size of this LPAR unless this app is really
clumsy in it's use of memory.  256M would probably be a good size to
start with, unless this app sucks up memory when it's running (we
can't tell from just the one sample).

As load increases on this application, or the data in core for this
application increases over time, the number of file cache pages and
buffers should decrease in relation to the total application storage,
but you're a long way from that point now.  I'd say you're pretty
overallocated for now.

-- db

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