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Memory and swap: free, available and the page cache

cheat sheet · Ubuntu 24.04 · Linux 6.8 · procps 4.0 https://lab.dimsanych.ru/en/wiki/memory-swap/

Cheat sheet

free -h memory and swap; the reserve is available
grep -E '^(Mem|Cached)' /proc/meminfo same from the kernel, KiB
ps -eo pid,rss,comm --sort=-rss | head -5 who holds the most
swapon --show active swap; empty means no swap
vmstat 1 5 si and so — swap reads and writes
sysctl vm.swappiness kernel's eagerness to swap, 60 by default
sync; echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches drop the cache