System monitor and top

props666999 · 11-26-2004, 08:41 PM

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

Linux.tar.gz · 11-26-2004, 11:50 PM

Perhaps gkrellm can be the judge

.
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.

props666999 · 11-27-2004, 07:22 AM

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

egag · 11-27-2004, 07:33 AM

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

props666999 · 11-27-2004, 07:44 AM

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

egag · 11-27-2004, 08:18 AM

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