memory being used?

[Jordon Bedwell]

On Mon, Sep 05, 2011 at 10:07:20AM -0700, Noah wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I would like to look at what programs are utilizing what memory.
> 
> :~$ free -m
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:           768        745         22          0          5        265
> -/+ buffers/cache:        474        293
> Swap:         1535        165       1370
> 
> currently I see that I am riding my memory almost 100% utilized.  I
> want to know what program is using that memory and how it is
> allocated.  how can I do that?

768 - 265 != "almost 100%", caches are pushed out as memory is needed
sudo sync; echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; free -m

That still doesn't solve the issue of your swap being utilised, if
this is a server then at some point you did OOM and start moving to
swap and it did calm down so you do still have an issue that needs
to be addressed but you won't see it right now most likely so it's
time to do some log analysis.