Score:0

how to analyze buff/cache memory

id flag

When I use free -m I get be below information

Before system restart

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          31549         809         369        1567       30371       28729
Swap:             0           0           0

After system restart

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          31549         405       30809          37         334       30767
Swap:             0           0           0

Ater restart the buff/cache memory started to increase gradually till. Is there a way to analyse which processor are occupying space in buff/cache. Also is it possible to see what is occupying buff/cache?

Score:2
ae flag

buff/cache refers to a portion of memory maintained by the operating system and used for "page cache" - used for caching the content of files to speed up disk IO. This is memory that, if needed, can be freed for other purposes - that's why you also see a lot of memory in the available column.

You shouldn't normally be worried about it - it's the responsibility of the kernel to manage this.

But sometimes, it can signal issues such as missing log file rotation - there's a great talk here about this specific problem and how to analyze it with Async Profiler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTDmpwhwy3E&list=PLNCLTEx3B8h4Yo_WvKWdLvI9mj1XpTKBr&t=4261s

By profiling this perf event: enter image description here

There are also programs like fincore and vmtouch that can be used on a specific file or even directory (vmtouch) to show how much space they occupy in the page cache

$ vmtouch .
...
           Files: 81989
     Directories: 8351
  Resident Pages: 297/1672196  1M/6G  0.0178%
         Elapsed: 0.8893 seconds
 
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