LXTask vs TOP,Memory usage,Who's lieing?

KennyDee · 09-02-2011, 05:39 PM

I recently started using PCLinuxOS LXDE 2011.06,I just checked the memory usage on both apps mentioned
and I was quite surprised from the major difference:
LXTask - 267MB
TOP - 597272k (583MB)

Obviously one of em is reporting it incorrectly,Any idea which? I'd appreciate some input on this.

syg00 · 09-02-2011, 06:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by KennyDee

Obviously one of em is reporting it incorrectly

Noooo - not necessarily.
That presumes they are reporting the same thing. A definitive definition of "memory usage" under Linux has defied the combined nous of the kernel devs (last I looked).
Generally the confusion is between whether cache/buffers are included in the numbers or not. Lots of threads here on this - have a look at "free -m" (note the second line), and see what correlates with what.

KennyDee · 09-02-2011, 09:19 PM

FreeM was more in line with top,Anyhow,After some googlin' around i was able to sort out LXTask,Seems that by default it shows cached memory as free,I unchecked that option and it's now
reporting it correctly so I guess this is solved,Thanks for your help.

speck · 09-04-2011, 12:53 AM

Most people consider the highlighted numbers below to be ones you should be watching. In my example, I'm using 586MB RAM and have almost 2.5GB RAM free.

Code:

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3031       1855       1176          0        680        588
-/+ buffers/cache:        586       2445
Swap:          512          0        511