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Questions tagged [free]

For questions about free, the command-line tool that displays the amount of free and use memory in a system. This tag shouldn’t be used for questions where free happens to be used; it’s appropriate for questions about free’s behaviour, options, sources of information, or the meaning of the information displayed by free.

1 vote
1 answer
66 views

Obtain memory values in SAR the same way as in FREE

I'd like to know if I can get memory in sar the same way I get it from free. Currently free shows me a memory usage of 47.06% (16956/36027)*100 [used/total x 100]. Whereas sar is showing me a usage of ...
Álvaro's user avatar
  • 111
-3 votes
2 answers
93 views

Error parsing memory value in bash script: expected integer expression

I have the following script to check free memory, #!/bin/bash THRESHOLD="500" FREE_MEM=$(free -mh | awk '/^Mem:/{print $4}') if [ "$FREE_MEM" -lt "$THRESHOLD" ]; then ...
Be_developer 's user avatar
0 votes
0 answers
66 views

Whatever would the cached include except for the file pages?

Environment: a standby/idle running physical system with RHEL 6.9 Symptom: We have done some dd tests in order to observe the change of the buffers/cached size in the free -m cmd. After we had ...
lylklb's user avatar
  • 285
0 votes
2 answers
311 views

Why is Linux not using RAM but only Swap?

How can such an output of free -m be explained? total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 32036 1012 225 3 8400 ...
theHacker's user avatar
  • 181
0 votes
1 answer
575 views

Free RAM memory from free command and Mobaxterm

I have several servers running Debian 10 or 11. I use Mobaxterm (Link) for SSH into the servers to check the status of the services and the RAM usage. I notice that the free --mega -t shows a amount ...
Federico's user avatar
  • 129
0 votes
1 answer
57 views

Logging sum of Mem and Swap from free command output

In relation to this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/754252/582781 Solution 1: free -g -s2 | sed -u -n 's/^Mem:\s\+[0-9]\+\s\+\([0-9]\+\)\s.\+/\1/p' >> memory.log Is there a way to add Swap to ...
Aleksander's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
110 views

Low memory vs total memory in "free" command

I am trying to understand the output of the free command on an AWS Linux server. For example, free -h gives: total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: ...
EugeneO's user avatar
  • 103
0 votes
2 answers
564 views

Getting only used memory from free command every few seconds

It was explained e.g. here: Get separate used memory info from free -m command how to cut the output of free command. But I want to do this every few seconds and log it to a file. So I tried: free -g -...
Aleksander's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
173 views

DELL R730XD 256GB memory but just showed 251GB on linux with command `free -h` and `htop` , why?

A DELL R730XD server with 32GiB * 8, totaling 256GB of memory, is correctly recognized as 256GB in the BIOS. When checking the memory information using "dmidecode -t memory" in Linux, the ...
BreakingGood's user avatar
0 votes
0 answers
5k views

linux drop_cache using "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" not working as expected

In our production environment we are running drop cache command echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches to free the RAM. But also what I found is dropping caches is not a good practice and also it won't ...
Swastik's user avatar
  • 103
0 votes
0 answers
390 views

Why the numbers of "free" don't add up?

This is a side question when I try to figure out why my Ubuntu18.04 server keeps using up memory and mysql gets killed from time to time. total used free shared buff/cache ...
shenkwen's user avatar
  • 143
0 votes
1 answer
4k views

what is the different between Buffer Cache that displayed from free command VS the available memory [closed]

we have 463 RHEL 7.6 machines in the cluster most of then are HDFS machines ( datanode ) from free -g command we can that usually buff/cache is around 30-50 when total memory is 256G as I know - a ...
yael's user avatar
  • 14k
2 votes
2 answers
3k views

Zero free swap but 56GiB free memory?

I have a CentOS7.9 system showing 56GiB free RAM (free -m) but only 1MiB free swap, and it's been in this state for three days. The original problem report was that a large (EE simulation) app keeps ...
David C.'s user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
1k views

need RAM & SWAP Memory monitoring Threshold

I wish to setup monitoring alerts upon used memory percentage. I had setup 0-80% used RAM as Green (good) 81-90% as yellow(acceptable) 91-95% as orange(warning) 96+ as Red(critical) However, i see ...
Ashar's user avatar
  • 527
0 votes
2 answers
97 views

When to upgrade RAM based on free output [closed]

I have a java application that runs on a Linux server with physical memory(RAM) allocated as 12GB where I would see the normal utilization over a period of time as below. sys> free -h ...
ragul rangarajan's user avatar

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