ps and free disagree on swap usage

James H. Cloos Jr. (cloos@jhcloos.com)
12 Dec 2002 06:23:55 -0500


Using procps from cvs at sources.redhat.com, up to date as of
wednesday night.

free(1) says:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 514664 456576 58088 0 31988 173088
-/+ buffers/cache: 251500 263164
Swap: 538136 23016 515120

which looks correct compared to /proc/meminfo.

OTOH, ps(1) (and qps for that matter) show much higher aggregate swap
usage. A couple of intersting lines from ps avxww --forest:

PID TTY STAT TIME MAJFL TRS DRS RSS %MEM COMMAND
1402 ? S 2:29 784 1336 100875 22308 4.3 \_ /usr/X11R6/bin/X :0 vt07 -auth /var/lib/xdm/authdir/authfiles/A:0-PNAkTo

1717 ? S 0:05 2692 454 100353 18608 3.6 \_ kppp
1718 ? S 0:00 34 454 14329 3752 0.7 | \_ kppp

3985 ? S 0:39 13864 785 57238 37040 7.1 \_ /opt/mozilla/mozilla-bin

4718 ? S 0:01 747 204 10219 6348 1.2 \_ xterm -u8
4720 pts/1 S 0:00 392 414 2393 1704 0.3 | \_ bash

plus another 8 or so xterms all with similar DRS vs RSS numbers. Qps
shows results similar to ps.

ps avxww|awk '{print $6 + $7 - $8}'|awk '{i += $1} END {print i}'

returned 470418 just now, when meminfo is claiming:

SwapTotal: 538136 kB
SwapFree: 515120 kB

Is this just a bug in /proc/meminfo?

-JimC

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