debian - top - watch free
debian - top - watch free
Because my Debian workstation is an older laptop that has 2Gb RAM and 1Gb swap, sometimes when I do a lot on my web browser, it will use up almost all the RAM and SWAP, and just start thrashing on the hardrive, making the system almost feel frozen, and in those cases, it can take many seconds to even be able to nice kill or close the browser.
So, I've gotten in the habit of always having a terminal open, and running TOP, nice'd, eleven second updates, sorted with Memory intensive stuff at the top.
nice top -d 11
But, remembered if I just want to monitor available memory, and then maybe close/restart a browser instance if available memory gets too low, perhaps 10% remaining or so, there is a lighter weight way to do it.
By using WATCH and FREE, with an eleven second interval, like so:
nice watch -n 11 free