4 ms·

You think Linux is alone in acting like that?

• andreasvc 12y ago
  No, but maybe others don't report such memory as used, which seems unfortunate to me.
  • Flow 12y ago
    FreeBSD has many labels for how it uses memory. Active, Inactive, Cache etc, to specify the purpose. See this question and answer: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/134862/what-do-the-different-memory-counters-in-freebsd-mean http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/134862/what-do-the-d...
    • Freaky 12y ago
      They're less labels for purpose and more labels for lifecycle - data you'd consider "cached" can appear just about anywhere. From what I remember (corrections more than welcome): Active is fully-fledged in use memory, mapped into one or more processes Inactive is where Active goes when it's less in-use. Cheap to reactivate, but relatively costly to free: can still be mapped into processes, and may be dirty (modified) and thus require writing to disk before being unmapped and cleared for reuse. Cached is where lesser used Inactive cached data goes before it dies. More costly to reactivate, but cheap to free: No longer mapped directly into any process, and strictly consists of only clean (unmodified) pages that don't need writing back to disk before clearing. Wired is pinned-down memory that can't be swapped out. ZFS's data and metadata caches are counted here, since it maintains its own (known as the ARC - Adaptive Replacement Cache, after the algorithm it's based on) instead of just relying on the traditional VM page cache.
  • Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
    At least Windows Servers do. Administrators are often confused about why all memory is being used, when it's used by disk cache. (memory mapped files)
  • metaobject 12y ago
    You can use 'free -m' to view the actual amount of memory being used.
    • dorfsmay 12y ago
      Or: free -h h for human, so it converts to KiB, MiB or GiB depending on which one is the most suitable.