OUR EXPERT Neil Mohr first used Linux in an HP ProLiant mini home server and never looked back.
Our upgrade tutorials are a perfect way to learn about how Linux interfaces with your PC’s different subsystems. Memory is oft overlooked for understandable reasons – largely because it’s taken for granted. Even if you’ve built your own PC, for most people it’s just a case of dropping in a couple of DIMMs and letting them self-configure.
But we’re hoping we can get you to stop and spare a thought for your poor unloved memory. Let’s take a quick refresh of how you can interrogate memory use (both via a GUI and the terminal) and test for possible corruption that can cause random crashes. While upgrading memory in the sense of swapping out older, slower memory for faster DIMMs is an edge case, adding more DIMMs for expanding total memory can be useful. Especially in an age where 16GB of memory has become the default.
On Gnome-based desktops the System Monitor tool (on KDE this is Plasma System Monitor) offers a rich set of resource monitoring tools. Use the Process tab to see a table version similar to top, discussed below.
A standard Linux terminal tool to get memory details is cat /proc/meminfo – this returns the contents from one of the special virtual filesystem folders that actually contains hardware information. In this case, memory use on the system controlled by the kernel. A bit easier to understand is the free command, which returns more basic system memory usage. Use the standard –help option for more details. From the terminal, if you want an interactive display of memory use, the top command monitors all the running tasks (htop is a richer experience), alongside a host of details about memory and swap use.