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Memory utilization

 
Shahul
Esteemed Contributor

Memory utilization


Hi,

Any one knows how to monitor memory usage in Linux servers. I am very new to Linux systems. is there any tool as such or any command which can monitor and give a report of memory usage. May be like Glance plus in HP.

TIA
Shahul
11 REPLIES 11
Vernon Brown_4
Trusted Contributor

Re: Memory utilization

From a terminal you can issue the command:

top

from the command line. It shows a summery of resource usage as well as processes. Also

man top

will give you some documentation on the top process.

There is a system monitor in the GUI under system I think.

Vern
Rodney McKee_1
New Member

Re: Memory utilization

Shahul

sar - part of sysstat package. "sar -rR" this is also easy to run through gplot to get a graphic output.
top - check some of the switches to have it report on memory etc as required.
gnome-system-monitor - This comes with Red Hat and can provide a realtime view of top and some graphs

Glance is available for Linux, looks to have some issues with motifversions but does look to work.
Hope this helps

Martin P.J. Zinser
Honored Contributor

Re: Memory utilization

Hello,

/proc/meminfo contains dynamically updated information on the overall memory status of the system.

Greetings, Martin
Steven E. Protter
Exalted Contributor

Re: Memory utilization

Here are a couple of sar scripts that you can adapt to do meeasurement over time to a file in Linux. You'll need to comment out the HP-UX stuff which is obvious.

See attachment.

SEP
Steven E Protter
Owner of ISN Corporation
http://isnamerica.com
http://hpuxconsulting.com
Sponsor: http://hpux.ws
Twitter: http://twitter.com/hpuxlinux
Founder http://newdatacloud.com
Roberto Polli
Trusted Contributor

Re: Memory utilization


try vmstat.

#man vstat

Peace, R.
Alexander Chuzhoy
Honored Contributor

Re: Memory utilization

and of course the
free
utility.
man free - for more information
Shahul
Esteemed Contributor

Re: Memory utilization


Hi,

Thanks to your reply. Yes, I have analyzed with top, sar and free, and also by ps commend. I could see my system's 96% memory is utilized in top command. But PS commend shows only 370MB is used by processes. I have 1.25GB of memory installed. Could someone explain me how the remaining memory is utilized.

TIA
Shahul
Don_89
Trusted Contributor

Re: Memory utilization

Linux uses all available memory becuase , all together now, unused memory is wasted memory.. I always do a free -m from the command line which displays the info in megabytes. The first line will have the following catagoies..

Total: Total system memeory
Used: Disk cache, Page Swap, running processes
Shared: Memory used that is shared between process
buffers: Memory pages swaped out to memory not disk
cached: disk cache


The next line is the actual memory used by processes/programs and memory free

used: progams/process
free: memory avaiable for programs/processes

The last line is for virutal memory which hopefully you'll never use.

Checkout this link for linux memory usage. It gets pretty technical though..

http://home.earthlink.net/~jknapka/linux-mm/vmoutline.html
Francisco J. Soler
Honored Contributor

Re: Memory utilization

Hi,

KDE and Gnome have some nice graphical interfaces to monitor the system resources, memory, disk etc.

If you have installed it in your server you can try:

gnome-system-monitor and ksysguard

i think it is not very useful in a server but it could help you to monitor the system status.

Frank.
Linux?. Yes, of course.
Steven E. Protter
Exalted Contributor

Re: Memory utilization

I you have X installed you can run gtop to run the gnome graphical top utility.

HP might have ported glance to Linux but that costs bucks.

SEP
Steven E Protter
Owner of ISN Corporation
http://isnamerica.com
http://hpuxconsulting.com
Sponsor: http://hpux.ws
Twitter: http://twitter.com/hpuxlinux
Founder http://newdatacloud.com
Guru Dutta
Frequent Advisor

Re: Memory utilization

Hi,

I guess with addition to top,sar,vmstat u can use gmond iff u have a cluster setup.