Comment by zenoprax
1 month ago
I don't understand why the default way to show RAM usage on Linux isn't to simply show "In Use vs. Available".
I don't care how much cache is being used and I can't really do anything about it even if I did.
1 month ago
I don't understand why the default way to show RAM usage on Linux isn't to simply show "In Use vs. Available".
I don't care how much cache is being used and I can't really do anything about it even if I did.
Cache is super important though. Not having enough memory for cache will tank your system performance, even if you have a ton of "available" memory
I'm not saying it's not important. It's that I don't have any control over it. Do I have enough "cache" in your opinion? Presently I have: Used: 14.6 Avail: 16.6 Cache: 4.2 Free: 6.4
If I'm asking the question "Is my system starved of RAM?" I am going to look at USED and AVAIL. CACHE is a curiosity more than anything else and FREE tells me nothing.
Also, under what circumstances would I have a ton of AVAIL and be starving the CACHE? That's an OS/kernel problem. If AVAIL drops to zero I can expect to get OOM crashing pretty quick.
atop (one of the many variants of top) reports numbers for "free", "available", and "cache" in its total systems report. As long as "available" is high, I don't worry about the RAM.