howto calculate free memory from top

[Charles Swiger]

On Tuesday, September 9, 2003, at 08:35 AM, Jesse Guardiani wrote:
> How do I calculate the amount of free memory my system
> has at any given point in time?

What do you mean by "free memory"?

> My top usually looks like this:
>
> Mem: 72M Active, 668M Inact, 165M Wired, 29M Cache, 112M Buf, 70M Free
> Swap: 2048M Total, 5448K Used, 2043M Free
>
> I understand the "70M Free" part, but should I add "668M Inact" to
> that? Or is it more complicated?

It's more complicated.  The "inactive" memory refers to pages that have 
been used (but not recently), and thus are candidates for being 
replaced by more active pages, if the system has enough activity to 
want such pages for other tasks.

-- 
-Chuck