Free as in Bytes

Speaker: Craig Small

Track: Sysadmin & DevOps

Type: Long talk (45 minutes)

Room: Grand amphi

Time: Jul 18 (Fri): 14:00

Duration: 0:45

How much memory is free on your system? It seems like a simple enough answer and for some people it is “whatever the free program says”.

But what if you wrote the free program? Or if you think free is not giving the right answer?

This talk will briefly describe the evolution of how Linux slices up its memory and how the procps free utility plays catch-up, a discussion about what “Free as in Bytes” means and gives some insight about how it is really difficult to first define what free memory is and boil it down to a single number that everyone agrees on.