[SGVLUG] Memory consumption monitoring?

[Sean O'Donnell]

I was just curious as to what is the best / most-accurate way to monitor
memory consumption?

I'm confused a bit because comparing '/proc/meminfo' results w/ 'top',
and the results displayed by 'gkrellm', are all different.

---

$ cat /proc/meminfo 

        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  260747264 257048576  3698688        0  6164480 102109184

---

$ top

Mem:    254636k total,   251224k used,     3412k free

---

And my gkrellm widget says there are 74mb free. 

I assume gkrellm can't be trusted as accurate, but all of these totals
are different, so it's hard to know which one to go by.

Are there any other programs that can be used to more-accuratly
determine the (exact) memory consumption? 

Which of these is closer to the truth? 

or is it that 'top' uses more memory than '/proc/meminfo', and that is
actually accurate??

Thanks,

Sean O'Donnell
Programmer Analyst (PHP)
Children's Oncology Group (COG) 
CureSearch Technology Group (CTG)

440 E. Huntinton Dr. 2nd Floor
Arcadia, CA 91066

[office] (626) 241-1752
[email] sodonnell at cogmembers.org

PGP Public Key: 0xE6A0E96C
PGP Public Key Server: http://pgp.mit.edu

----