Re: A question about memory usage

[Adam Tauno Williams <adamtaunowilliams(at)gmail(dot)com>]

>    I have a server with 4GB of RAM and I wanted to know how much memory
> is being used by a PostgreSQL. To do so I have executed the following:
>    ps -A -o rss,vsz,command|grep postgres | awk '{rss += $1; vsz += $2 }
> END { print "Real: ",rss/1024"MB Virtual: ",vsz/1024"MB" }'
> And the result is:
>    Real:  157.59MB Virtual:  6359.04MB
> So I understand that amount of virtual memory must be swapped to disk as
> it's bigger that my physical memory. To check this I have executed the
> free command and I get the following results:
>          total         used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:   4153180     3988536     164644          0     161400    3117900
> -/+ buffers/cache:  709236    3443944
> Swap:      6215672      64    6215608
>    So my question is, what I'm doing wrong? because the swap it's almost
> empty

You are misunderstanding what these numbers mean on a UNIX system.

For starters -
http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-memory-usage-on-linux.html

And if you are not swapping, and your OS's cache is that huge, why
bother? 

Use "ipcs" to display the allocation of shared memory.

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams, Network & Systems Administrator
Consultant - http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com
Developer - http://www.opengroupware.org