From 34e431b0ae398fc54ea69ff85ec700722c9da773 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Rik van Riel Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 15:49:05 -0800 Subject: /proc/meminfo: provide estimated available memory Many load balancing and workload placing programs check /proc/meminfo to estimate how much free memory is available. They generally do this by adding up "free" and "cached", which was fine ten years ago, but is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong today. It is wrong because Cached includes memory that is not freeable as page cache, for example shared memory segments, tmpfs, and ramfs, and it does not include reclaimable slab memory, which can take up a large fraction of system memory on mostly idle systems with lots of files. Currently, the amount of memory that is available for a new workload, without pushing the system into swap, can be estimated from MemFree, Active(file), Inactive(file), and SReclaimable, as well as the "low" watermarks from /proc/zoneinfo. However, this may change in the future, and user space really should not be expected to know kernel internals to come up with an estimate for the amount of free memory. It is more convenient to provide such an estimate in /proc/meminfo. If things change in the future, we only have to change it in one place. Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel Reported-by: Erik Mouw Acked-by: Johannes Weiner Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt | 9 +++++++++ 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+) (limited to 'Documentation/filesystems') diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt index 22d89aa3721..8533f5f9bb2 100644 --- a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt +++ b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt @@ -767,6 +767,7 @@ The "Locked" indicates whether the mapping is locked in memory or not. MemTotal: 16344972 kB MemFree: 13634064 kB +MemAvailable: 14836172 kB Buffers: 3656 kB Cached: 1195708 kB SwapCached: 0 kB @@ -799,6 +800,14 @@ AnonHugePages: 49152 kB MemTotal: Total usable ram (i.e. physical ram minus a few reserved bits and the kernel binary code) MemFree: The sum of LowFree+HighFree +MemAvailable: An estimate of how much memory is available for starting new + applications, without swapping. Calculated from MemFree, + SReclaimable, the size of the file LRU lists, and the low + watermarks in each zone. + The estimate takes into account that the system needs some + page cache to function well, and that not all reclaimable + slab will be reclaimable, due to items being in use. The + impact of those factors will vary from system to system. Buffers: Relatively temporary storage for raw disk blocks shouldn't get tremendously large (20MB or so) Cached: in-memory cache for files read from the disk (the -- cgit v1.2.3-18-g5258