How can I describe or explain "buffers" in the output of free
?
$ free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 501M 146M 19M 9.7M 335M 331M
Swap: 1.0G 85M 938M
$ free -w -h
total used free shared buffers cache available
Mem: 501M 146M 19M 9.7M 155M 180M 331M
Swap: 1.0G 85M 938M
I don't have any (known) problem with this system. I am just surprised and curious to see that "buffers" is almost as high as "cache" (155M v.s. 180M). I thought "cache" represented the page cache of file contents, and tended to be the most significant part of "cache/buffers". I'm not sure what "buffers" are though.
For example, I compared this to my laptop which has more RAM. On my laptop, the "buffers" figure is an order of magnitude smaller than "cache" (200M v.s. 4G). If I understood what "buffers" were then I could start to look at why the buffers grew to such a larger proportion on the smaller system.
From man proc
(I ignore the hilariously outdated definition of "large"):
Buffers %lu
Relatively temporary storage for raw disk blocks that shouldn't get tremendously large (20MB or so).
Cached %lu
In-memory cache for files read from the disk (the page cache). Doesn't include SwapCached.
$ free -V
free from procps-ng 3.3.12
$ uname -r # the Linux kernel version
4.9.0-6-marvell
$ systemd-detect-virt # this is not inside a virtual machine
none
$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 513976 kB
MemFree: 20100 kB
MemAvailable: 339304 kB
Buffers: 159220 kB
Cached: 155536 kB
SwapCached: 2420 kB
Active: 215044 kB
Inactive: 216760 kB
Active(anon): 56556 kB
Inactive(anon): 73280 kB
Active(file): 158488 kB
Inactive(file): 143480 kB
Unevictable: 10760 kB
Mlocked: 10760 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 513976 kB
LowFree: 20100 kB
SwapTotal: 1048572 kB
SwapFree: 960532 kB
Dirty: 240 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 126912 kB
Mapped: 40312 kB
Shmem: 9916 kB
Slab: 37580 kB
SReclaimable: 29036 kB
SUnreclaim: 8544 kB
KernelStack: 1472 kB
PageTables: 3108 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 1305560 kB
Committed_AS: 1155244 kB
VmallocTotal: 507904 kB
VmallocUsed: 0 kB
VmallocChunk: 0 kB
$ sudo slabtop --once
Active / Total Objects (% used) : 186139 / 212611 (87.5%)
Active / Total Slabs (% used) : 9115 / 9115 (100.0%)
Active / Total Caches (% used) : 66 / 92 (71.7%)
Active / Total Size (% used) : 31838.34K / 35031.49K (90.9%)
Minimum / Average / Maximum Object : 0.02K / 0.16K / 4096.00K
OBJS ACTIVE USE OBJ SIZE SLABS OBJ/SLAB CACHE SIZE NAME
59968 57222 0% 0.06K 937 64 3748K buffer_head
29010 21923 0% 0.13K 967 30 3868K dentry
24306 23842 0% 0.58K 4051 6 16204K ext4_inode_cache
22072 20576 0% 0.03K 178 124 712K kmalloc-32
10290 9756 0% 0.09K 245 42 980K kmalloc-96
9152 4582 0% 0.06K 143 64 572K kmalloc-node
9027 8914 0% 0.08K 177 51 708K kernfs_node_cache
7007 3830 0% 0.30K 539 13 2156K radix_tree_node
5952 4466 0% 0.03K 48 124 192K jbd2_revoke_record_s
5889 5870 0% 0.30K 453 13 1812K inode_cache
5705 4479 0% 0.02K 35 163 140K file_lock_ctx
3844 3464 0% 0.03K 31 124 124K anon_vma
3280 3032 0% 0.25K 205 16 820K kmalloc-256
2730 2720 0% 0.10K 70 39 280K btrfs_trans_handle
2025 1749 0% 0.16K 81 25 324K filp
1952 1844 0% 0.12K 61 32 244K kmalloc-128
1826 532 0% 0.05K 22 83 88K trace_event_file
1392 1384 0% 0.33K 116 12 464K proc_inode_cache
1067 1050 0% 0.34K 97 11 388K shmem_inode_cache
987 768 0% 0.19K 47 21 188K kmalloc-192
848 757 0% 0.50K 106 8 424K kmalloc-512
450 448 0% 0.38K 45 10 180K ubifs_inode_slab
297 200 0% 0.04K 3 99 12K eventpoll_pwq
288 288 100% 1.00K 72 4 288K kmalloc-1024
288 288 100% 0.22K 16 18 64K mnt_cache
287 283 0% 1.05K 41 7 328K idr_layer_cache
240 8 0% 0.02K 1 240 4K fscrypt_info