RE: Correctly determine amount of "free memory"

[Gregory Giguashvili]

> That's not really a meaningful question. 
Sorry, I did my best :)

> The qualified answer is that /proc/meminfo gives you the available
information and what number 
> you want depends upon what you plan to do with it. Swapping is not
necessarily the right metric 
> for two reasons.
I plan to commit the largest chunk of memory in the quickest way. This
operation may be slowed down by swapping - that's why I don't want to
get there. If swapping is not the right metric, what is then? 

According to my humble experiments with 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, some cashed
memory reported in /proc/meminfo is reused and some is swapped. The real
problem here is that I couldn't find the right way to "predict" how much
cached memory will be discarded before starting to swap when system is
low on available RAM.

Thanks
Giga
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