Unix and Linux Stack Exchange
Unix and Linux Stack Exchange

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.

33 questions
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Why does swappiness not work?

We have a RHEL 7 machine, with only 2G of available RAM: free -g total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 31 28 0 0 1 2 Swap: 15 …
yael
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Why the difference in neofetch and free (RAM) output?

wadewayne@Cheetah:~$ neofetch MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMmds+. wadewayne@Cheetah MMm----::-://////////////oymNMd+` ----------------- MMd /++ -sNMd: OS: Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia x86_64 MMNso/` dMM `.::-. .-::.`…
Wade Wayne
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What is "effective used" memory on Linux? "used" or ("total"-"available")?

I need to display in GUI for operator used memory vs available on Linux Server So what would be logically correct value to display as usage? [root@host ~]# free total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: …
ALZ
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1 answer

Devuan - how to install non-free contrib?

I'm on transition from Mac OS-X to Devuan. Trying to make the learning curve not as steep, I need to install some non-free software. Reading through forums, I understand there is a command that will allow me to install Dropbox, skype, bluetooth…
Guillermo
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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 total of 256GB is also reported correctly. However, the "free…
SomeNetDrugs' SuperStunRod
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2 answers

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 crashing. Can anyone help me understand what could…
David C.
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1 answer

What's the difference between memory shown with the free command and the top command?

I am new to running a linux server and wanted to know the difference between the total memory shown with the top command (which appears to be 78GB) and the free command which shows that I have 743GB of memory Thank you in advance!
CyberStems
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1 answer

Xen Server: Free memory != dmidecode -t17 output

Overview I'm running a Xen server on Debian buster. Latest kernel, latest BIOS version, legacy boot. Booting into Xen server only shows 8 GB of RAM free while recognizing 16 GB of RAM connected. Booting into Debian without Xen shows all 16 GB of RAM…
HBSKan
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1
vote
2 answers

free command - different outputs after conversion

I'm monitoring my RAM on a CentOS 6 server and when I free -h I see 15G available which is OK but when I free -b I see 1641154969 bytes which equals 1,641154969G. free -h total used free shared buffers …
Thomas Rodriguez
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2 answers

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 -s2 | sed -n…
Aleksander
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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 help much because when a process require more memory…
Swastik
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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 available Mem: 3.9G 1.2G 142M …
shenkwen
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backup snapshot vultr linux host to local Windows

Vultr Linux snapshots are falling too expensive as the number of servers we acquired has grown. Thus, I wish to create a snapshot/backup (entire OS along with open ports, swap memory and installed softwares) of only Linux servers of Vultr and save…
Ashar
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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 that my current usage of RAM is 99% yet everything…
Ashar
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When to upgrade RAM based on free output

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 total used free shared …
ragul rangarajan
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