Understand Linux Memory

My colleague is managing a set of Redhat Linux servers for customer. An ex-colleague of ours gave him a script to run as a cron job to monitor free memory and email will be sent out if it is below certain threshold. What the script does is basically work out the percentage of free memory from /proc/meminfo based on this equation - 100*MemFree/MemTotal. Guess what happen, tonnes of email alerts will flood your Inbox and you will start to worry about not having enough memory.

However, the author of the script basically do not have a deep understanding of how memory is allocated, used, buffered, cached and released.

If you have an hour to spare, I strongly recommend you to watch the video in this blog - The Answer to Free Memory, Swap, Oracle, and Everything. If you want to convince your customer that the server has enough memory to run whatever application, just ask them to watch that video.