HOWTO: Check My System RAM With “Cat”.
OK, the title doesn’t really work, but the point is that this is the third way I know of to check if my GNU/Linux box has recognized all my RAM. And probably the geekiest.
At the command line, type the command:
cat /proc/meminfo
This will display the contents of the /proc/meminfo file. One day I really should go into the contents of the /proc directory as it’s a pretty neat place, but that’s a thought for later.
Note the first line in my output (click on it for a larger pic from Flickr): MemTotal: 449444kB. This confirms that my machine is seeing 444MB of my RAM which, when you add back in the 64MB that is shared with my video card, comes out to a total of 508 which is pretty close to the 512 I have installed.
That concludes this really, really interesting little series (#1, #2) on the many ways to see how much RAM your system is aware of. Wow…hope nobody fell asleep at the wheel.
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4 opinions for HOWTO: Check My System RAM With “Cat”.
Shawn
Mar 17, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Another way to check your ram is to use “dmesg”. On my box I see the following snippet when I run dmesg (this part is from near the top of the output):
127MB HIGHMEM available.
896MB LOWMEM available.
This tells me that the kernel has recognized that my box has 1 GB of RAM, and is making use of it. If the kernel did not recognize the 1GB, I would not see the HIGHMEM line. That would result in my computer only ever using 896 MB of the total available RAM.
There is a setting in the kernel config where you indicate if you have less than 1 GB, 1 GB - 4GB, or more than 4 GB. If you have a gig of ram, then you have to select the 1-4 option, or you won’t get full access.
Hope this helps someone.
Jon
Mar 17, 2006 at 4:35 pm
Hey Shawn,
Thanks for stopping by. Yes - DMesg….I didn’t know about that but I see the same thing you do (with noticably less memorr for sure).
Thanks!
Shawn
Mar 17, 2006 at 6:12 pm
dmesg is the first place I stop when I’m trying to figure out hardware issues. It tells me if devices are being seen or not…
fornetti
Aug 31, 2008 at 5:50 am
I do not believe this
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