1

I am getting sum of all reserved memory in KBs by using following command:-

ps aux --sort -rss | awk '{sum +=$6} END {print sum}'
OUTPUT: 14746220 i.e. 14.74GB

However free -g returns 27GB as used. Why there is a difference between the two outputs? Doesn't ps shows all the memory allocation?

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

I had the exact same situation. htop and top both reported about 95% usage (excluding buffers/caches) as did free -m. When summing up the processes from ps, I only was using about 10% of the memory. I found these sites to be invaluable:

In my case it was the dentries/inode cache that was filling the memory. I don't know why free didn't count these as buffers/cache. You can flush this information with the following command, which does not hurt the system:

echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Information about this is detailed here: https://linux-mm.org/Drop_Caches

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .