How do I see what's eating all my memory?
 

My 128K RH7.0 box seems to be running out of RAM see thread "Cannot kill process - please help!" at
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...?threadid=6023

My top -M listing shows nothing much is running -- 7 or 8 httpd processes show as using 4% memory each, sshd is in there, pretty much all other ports are switched off and I'm not running anything else. Yet 'top' and 'free' both show around 4Nb free RAM.

I understand that Linux grabs large chunks of available RAM for swapping -- so how do I work out how much RAM I've *really* got? The server vendor is telling us that 128Mb may be insufficient for IBM JDK 1.3 ?? Unless I can see how much is really free I can't tell if this makes sense.

Any help would be much appreciated - thanks.
- Thomas.

PS

The output of 'free' shows you the total memory in use and the amount used for buffers, the amount used for caching and the total free. The amount you've 'really' got free will be the 'total free' + buffers + cache... however Java does chew memory like it is going out of fashion.

If you are in X then I'd recomment you use gtop to check your system details.

cheers

Jamie...