Hello

I use top command to monitor memory usage on my Debian server.
There is something i don't understand: if i add every "VIRT" field for each process, it's not equal to "Mem: XXX used". (I have 0k used in SWAP).

I'd have expected that "Mem used + Swap used" = "sum(VIRT for each process)". In practice we have:
"Mem used + Swap used" > "sum(VIRT for each process)"
I guess the difference is the kernel's memory ?

Can anyone confirm this ? And how can i see the memory taken by the kernel ?

Thanks a lot !

They shouldn't be equal. There is a lot included in the total of the VIRT values that is not in either "Mem" or Swap. There is also a lot in "Mem" that is not in any "Virt".

I expect the reason the difference is in that direction is caching. You probably have very little "memory pressure" so a large fraction of memory is used by caching.

One of the important measures of Kernel memory use is the "Slab" line you can find within
cat /proc/meminfo

I think that will typically represent most of the memory in use by the kernel. I don't recall where you can find more detail on kernel memory use. But since the kernel memory use isn't responsible for the big difference you are seeing vs. what you expect, probably you don't need any detail on kernel memory use.

let's take this /proc/meminfo for example:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/e...c-meminfo.html

Can you fill the blank ?
MemTotal = MemFree + Buffers + Cached + Slab + ???

btw i don't have a huge difference between "used + swap" and "sum(VIRT)" (resp. 218168 and 213104).

I don't know if the numbers are available to add up total memory use that way.

In the /proc/meminfo I'm looking at, there is an entry for AnonPages, which is not in the document you linked.

I think AnonPages and Mapped together represent the ordinary memory use of ordinary processes. But when I add things up on my own system

MemTotal < MemFree + Buffers + Cached + Slab + AnonPages + Mapped

even though I think some other things (such as PageTables) belong on the right and I don't know how any of those items on the right might overlap each other and/or be outside of MemTotal, so I don't know why they can add up to more than MemTotal.

As I said earlier, there are large parts of each of those that aren't included in the other. So comparing them has little meaning.

yes, that's a little sad ...

i will continue to look for a more "mathematic" explanation and if i find anything i'll post it here for other readers ...

thanks

Hi. Maybe you are looking for something like this:
dmesg | grep Memory
My output is: