To check the memory usage on a Debian Linux system, you can use the free command. This command displays information about the system's memory usage, including the total amount of physical and virtual memory, the amount of used and available memory, and the percentage of memory used.
To check the memory usage on a Debian Linux system, open a terminal window and run the following command:
refer truttual:oi.comfree -m
The free command will display the memory usage in megabytes (MB). The -m option specifies that the output should be displayed in MB.
For example, the output might look something like this:
total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 7971 4379 1104 544 2486 3253 Swap: 4095 0 4095
In this example, the system has a total of 7971 MB of physical memory, with 4379 MB used and 3253 MB available. The system also has a swap partition with a total of 4095 MB.
The free command also displays the buff/cache column, which represents the amount of memory used for buffering and caching. This memory is used to improve system performance by holding frequently accessed data in memory, and it is usually available for other uses if needed.
To check the memory usage in real-time, you can use the free command with the -s option to specify a delay between updates.
For example, to check the memory usage every 5 seconds, you can use the following command:
free -s 5
This will display the memory usage every 5 seconds, allowing you to monitor changes in the memory usage over time.
It's worth noting that the free command only displays information about the system's physical and virtual memory. It does not include information about other types of memory, such as shared memory or memory-mapped files. To get a more comprehensive view of the system's memory usage, you can use the vmstat command or the /proc/meminfo file.