howto calculate free memory from top

[Jesse Guardiani]

Dan Nelson wrote:

> In the last episode (Sep 09), Jesse Guardiani said:
>> 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.
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/admin.html#TOP-MEMORY-STATES
> does a pretty good job of explaining the states.

Yes, all except Buf, but `man top` explains that pretty well.


> 
>> So they _are_ available for use then? And thus are relatively free,
>> correct?
> 
> All memory except for Wired is "free", to varying degrees.

OK. Just out of curiosity, what would you say about my example then:

------
Mem: 72M Active, 668M Inact, 165M Wired, 29M Cache, 112M Buf, 70M Free
Swap: 2048M Total, 5448K Used, 2043M Free
------

Based on that FAQ, I would say that I've got about 80M of immediately
available memory, and if the system gets pushed really hard, I can
probably spare another 600M or so with relatively minimal swap usage.

Is that accurate?

Thanks!


Sincerely,

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