different memory estimates

[Alexander Toresson]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 11:38 PM, Liviu Andronic<landronimirc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 10:54 PM, Brian J. Tarricone<brian at tarricone.org> wrote:
>> Hmm, that's a little odd. Try looking at /proc/meminfo.  You'll have to do
>> some math to subtract out buffers and cache from the used memory figure, but
>>
> I did the math. At the moment when I opened /proc/meminfo, taskmanager
> reported 304 MB and systemload 312 MB. The proc file reported this:
> MemTotal:       482784 kB
> MemFree:         11408 kB
> Buffers:          7932 kB
> Cached:         151776 kB
>
> (482784-7932-151776)/1024=315 MB
>
> Unless I'm wrong in math, I would suspect systemload is more accurate.
> Liviu

Part of this could stem through different definitions of kB and MB.
Look up kibibyte and mibibyte. Basically, taskmanager could be
reporting 304 * 1024^2 bytes, while systemload reports 312 * 1000^2
bytes. I don't know whether /proc/meminfo defines a kB as 1024 bytes
or 1000 bytes.

// Alexander