Find Memory Or RAM And Swap Usage In Linux

RAM plays an important role in the performance of a system. So we should monitor this memory usage to troubleshoot system. free is the basic command to get details of RAM and swap usage.

#free

Example :

# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3059872 2842016 217856 0 33936 2012684
-/+ buffers/cache: 795396 2264476
Swap: 2000052 67672 1932380

When you see its giving total size, used and free size in bytes. If you want to see in MB specify
-m option in free

#free -m

Example :

# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2988 2784 203 0 33 1974
-/+ buffers/cache: 776 2211
Swap: 1953 66 1887

Any other commands to check RAM?
The answer for this is yes.
1. Use proc file system to get detailed RAM usage of the system.

#cat /proc/meminfo

2. Use top command to see RAM usage

So with top too you can see RAM usage live.

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How To Find And Remove Core Files In Linux?

What is a"Core file" ? Ans : A core file is created when a program is crashed/stoped abnormally due to some bug. This will be huge size which contains all the memory info, crash info which is used for programmers to debug the issue and find a solution or patch to that bug.

Why we system administrators are interested in that core files?
Ans : This is because of their size. As we do monitoring of systems on daily basis but suddenly your disk is full one day when you came to office, you are total blank thinking how come disk is full though there is no much user activity etc. So core files are one reason which will eat up our disk. Which you have to check for when sudden disk activity is observed.

How to find core files ?
#find / -name core

This find command will search entire filesystem for core files.. once you find them use rm command to remove those files..
#rm -rf core

So how it got its name?
A core dump file gets its name from an old memory technology using tiny magnetic cores for storage.

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