[ale] What does the "shared" mean in the ouput of free
hirsch at zapmedia.com
hirsch at zapmedia.com
Mon Mar 25 09:13:29 EST 2002
Joseph A Knapka writes:
> hirsch at zapmedia.com wrote:
> >
> > When I run the command 'free' I get something like this:
> >
> > total used free shared buffers cached
> > Mem: 110600 109180 1420 0 8772 27780
> > -/+ buffers/cache: 72628 37972
> > Swap: 131504 480 131024
> >
> > What exactly does "shared" mean? Is that only memory shared between
> > processes using shared memory, or does it count libraries that are
> > shared between programs?
>
> I am pretty sure that "shared" counts only SyxV shared memory
> mappings, not generic sharing of mmapped files.
Okay, that makes sense.
> > On my laptop I have 128 MB of RAM and I'm swapping like crazy. I'm
> > running KDE which is large, but I thought that since almost all my
> > applications are KDE applications they should share a lot. Instead I
> > get almost no "share"d memory.
> >
> > Am I misunderstanding the meaning of share?
>
> I think so. At the very minumum, everything dynamically linked
> to libc.so (which means pretty much everything - annoyingly,
> even vital stuff like "mv" and "ls" is dynamically linked on
> some distributions) will share all the pages they use in that
> lib.
>
> Just curious, what kernel version are you running? It doesn't
> look like you should be swapping too much with the numbers
> you give above; does vmstat show a lot of swap activity?
Sorry, I just cut and pasted out of another machine, not my laptop.
I'm not getting much swap activity from the one I posted (which is
running 2.4.2) but from my laptop which is running 2.4.8, I think.
Thanks. I feel better for getting that explained.
--Michael
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