Hi Folks,
As we all know, the "free memory" reported by e.g. 'free'
is usually very small. E.g. on this machine (endowed with
"a massive 128MB RAM" (OK it's an oldish laptop and I'm
cynically quoting typical ad material) I get
> free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 126024 117952 8072 0 1476 50184
-/+ buffers/cache: 66292 59732
Swap: 400640 124092 276548
and of course the "free 8072" is illusory. In reality much
more is available -- at least, I suppose, the 59732KB "free"
in buffers/cache, though I;m not really sure about this since
I don't know the underlying details of this report.
My Question is: suppose I want to embark on a RAM-intensive
task, e.g. a numerical computation with large objects, or
maybe a CD burn, where I'd like to make the most use of RAM.
I can tell the application how much RAM it can expect to use.
So: How can I determine, by some system command, how much of
the RAM is actually up for grabs. so that I can tell the
program to use (e.g.) 64MB RAM?
In other words, how could I find out that 64MB RAM would be
available?
And should I use 'nice' to make sure that the program can
jump the queue?
All advice appreciated!
Best wishes to all,
Ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972
Date: 27-Jul-04 Time: 19:18:28
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