check free ram in single user mode

[tecknophreak]

how can i check what free ram i have in single user mode(no x-windows)

[FoBoT]

free

maybe?

[tecknophreak]

huh. would ya look at that.

[FoBoT]

actually, the only reason i knew that one, was becuase a few days ago i needed to find out as well, but i was too chicken to post so i searched for quite some time, and finally found a thread where it was mentioned :o

:D

[tecknophreak]

well thanks. it came in handy

though i have a new q. how can i add more to MEM? it says i have 57 MB and I need a bit more, around 100 or so. any way i could hook that up?

[ 03 January 2002: Message edited by: tecknophreak ]

[FoBoT]

do you mean make your swap file larger?

i dunno, better start a new thread :rolleyes:

[tecknophreak]

when I do a "free -m" and i'm not running anything i get:

total used free
Mem: 57 12 44
-/+ bffer 3 53
Swap: 517 0 517

when i run my programs the Mem: used buffers goes up and the free goes down. BUT the Swap never goes anywhere.

I guess I'm also asking is, what's the diff between mem and swap? I thought they were the same.

[FoBoT]

i dunno

i found some related linkage
http://www.ahinc.com/linux101/status.htm#free
http://searchenterpriseservers.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid25_gci775843,00.html
http://www.mandrakeuser.org/docs/admin/aproc2.html
http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/solrhe/Securing-Optimizing-Linux-RH-Edition-v1.3/chap6sec69.html

[TacKat]

Swap is the virtual memory. When Linux needs more memory than you have of physical RAM, it "swaps" (hence the name) some of the data from the RAM onto the harddisk.

The only way to increase your memory is to get more RAM.

[tecknophreak]

the funny thing, i think which causes me the most grief, is that i have 256 MB RAM. the free/top pages helped, thanks FoBoT.

but i still haven't come around to why my Mem is not represented using free. or it could be i'm just a jackass. hmmm

[Linuxcool]

Have you told linux how much memory you have? If you're using lilo, you can add an append line like this to your lilo.conf file:

append="mem=256M"

or you could add the mem=256M part to an already existing append line. If you're using grub just add the mem=256M to the end of the kernel line.

[ 04 January 2002: Message edited by: Linuxcool ]