howto calculate free memory from top

[Jesse Guardiani]

Charles Swiger wrote:

> 
> On Tuesday, September 9, 2003, at 08:35 AM, Jesse Guardiani wrote:
>> How do I calculate the amount of free memory my system
>> has at any given point in time?
> 
> What do you mean by "free memory"?

Memory that can be used by other programs before the vm starts using
swap.


> 
>> My top usually looks like this:
>>
>> Mem: 72M Active, 668M Inact, 165M Wired, 29M Cache, 112M Buf, 70M Free
>> Swap: 2048M Total, 5448K Used, 2043M Free
>>
>> I understand the "70M Free" part, but should I add "668M Inact" to
>> that? Or is it more complicated?
> 
> It's more complicated.  The "inactive" memory refers to pages that have
> been used (but not recently), and thus are candidates for being
> replaced by more active pages, if the system has enough activity to
> want such pages for other tasks.

So they _are_ available for use then? And thus are relatively free, correct?

-- 
Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator
WingNET Internet Services,
P.O. Box 2605 // Cleveland, TN 37320-2605
423-559-LINK (v)  423-559-5145 (f)
http://www.wingnet.net