System monitor and top
 

In kde under slackware 10 The System Monitor reports
used memory 93 MB of 250 MB
used swap 25.4 MB of 573 MB

using in a xterm the top command reports:

Mem: 256056k total, 251648k used, 4408k free, 7588k buffers
Swap: 586364k total, 26040k used, 560324k free, 149300k cached



which one should i believe , just wondering


Thank You

:D Perhaps gkrellm can be the judge :D .
Both are true because KDE's monitor don't indicate the buffered or swapped or shared ram (don't know the difference, can someone explain?). I think KDE's one shows pure availability.

gkrellm reports same as System Monitor , so top i think is not very accurate

take a look at the output of " cat /proc/meminfo "
a large part of mem. is use for disk-caching for fast access.
top is correct, it just don't output the cache-size.

egag

so what you said is the top command counts the cached memory as well but the gui's (System Monitor , gkrellm ) add cached memory to unsused (free) memory

if you use kde-systemguard , and look at a graph of the physical memory,
it's presented in 3 colors: used by prog's/os ; used for buffers ; used for cache .
the top-output counts the three together as used.

egag