But that does not just mean that application now can only request for 2943 MB free memory, If you look at the usage figures you can see that 5941 MB memory use is for buffers and cache. In this example, total memory is 11901 MB, 8957 MB is used and 2943 MB free. Let’s see the below example and understand: you can read more about options on the manpage. The free command comes with the set of options you can choose to modify the results, like with option “-m” result will display memory in MegaByte. We will use free and top to understand the memory utilization of our operating system. The top command can display system summary information as well as a list of the process currently being managed by the Linux kernel. The “ top” command provides a dynamic real-time view of a running system. The “ free” command usually displays the total amount of free and used physical and swap memory in the system, as well as the buffers used by the kernel.

Linux comes with many commands to check memory usage. It performs good with fewer resources and tries to maximize utilization of available resources automatically and because of this, it’s slightly difficult to understand resource utilization.

Check ram utilization in linux