/proc/meminfo, free, and swap space

- [Instructor] Let's look at /proc/meminfo.…Meminfo is a handy proc file.…It's maybe 46 lines of information, a lot of stuff in there.…Remember since it's a proc file,…it's always up-to-date, fresh information.…Whenever you cat it, you're asking the kernel…to generate the contents of it right then.…One thing that confuses a lot of folks is MemFree.…And you see MemFree and it's a small number…and you kind of freak out.…

But really you want it to be kind of small,…because you want the kernel to be…making use of your RAM for caching.…So it's really MemAvailable that's more important.…MemAvailable is an estimate of how much is available…for programs, without resorting to swapping,…which of course is a bad thing.…So don't worry about MemFree, worry about MemAvailable.…We see at the top MemTotal is the total amount…of RAM on your system.…And on this little system I've got about eight gig.…

And the free is kind of small, but that's okay,…but there's quite a bit available.…I'm not really running much right now.…And we see other sorts of things including,…