In this article we show you various command line commands to retrieve information about the memory on your Raspberry Pi
This was tested on a Raspberry Pi 4.
The command “free” provides information about the working memory:
free
When I ran this I saw this
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 1911988 173552 1407280 31544 331156 1621596
Swap: 102396 0 102396Total: This field shows the total amount of memory and how much is installed on your system.
Used: This column tells how much memory is used currently by running processes. The used memory can be calculated using this formula = total – free – buffer/cache.
Free: This field represents how much memory is free or is not being used by any process.
Shared: This field represents the memory that is being shared by multiple processes.
Buffers: This field shows the amount of memory reserved by the OS kernel. The memory could be allocated further if any application needed memory,
Cached: This field tells the amount of memory that is used to store recent data and files in RAM
Available: This field represents the amount of memory available for starting a new process without memory swapping.
If you want the values in MByte right away you can run this
free -m -t
When I ran this I saw this
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 1867 170 1373 30 323 1582
Swap: 99 0 99
Total: 1967 170 1473Memory usage and swap behavior
Learn more about memory usage and swap behavior
cat /proc/meminfo
When I ran this I saw this
MemTotal: 1911988 kB
MemFree: 1406312 kB
MemAvailable: 1620988 kB
Buffers: 60880 kB
Cached: 246708 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 301312 kB
Inactive: 137896 kB
Active(anon): 131896 kB
Inactive(anon): 31268 kB
Active(file): 169416 kB
Inactive(file): 106628 kB
Unevictable: 16 kB
Mlocked: 16 kB
HighTotal: 1232896 kB
HighFree: 842044 kB
LowTotal: 679092 kB
LowFree: 564268 kB
SwapTotal: 102396 kB
SwapFree: 102396 kB
Dirty: 56 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 131684 kB
Mapped: 99964 kB
Shmem: 31544 kB
KReclaimable: 23924 kB
Slab: 40044 kB
SReclaimable: 23924 kB
SUnreclaim: 16120 kB
KernelStack: 1736 kB
PageTables: 3616 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 1058388 kB
Committed_AS: 935600 kB
VmallocTotal: 245760 kB
VmallocUsed: 4972 kB
VmallocChunk: 0 kB
Percpu: 464 kB
CmaTotal: 262144 kB
CmaFree: 256028 kBDistribution of shared memory
The following will display the available RAM for the memory of the processor and the GPU in MB
vcgencmd get_mem arm && vcgencmd get_mem gpu
When I ran this I saw this
arm=948M
gpu=76M