On Jun 4, 12:45 pm, aidy wrote:
> Using vmstat, is the active memory (avm) compared in relation to the
> free (fre) memory, a good metric for memory usage?

No, they are not directly related. It is possible for a large program
to have a large amount of unused memory pages dormant in paging.

These are my favourite memory related checks:
AVM > realmem - if memory is over-committed (specifically comp.
memory)
fre - if the "free" memory pool is getting depleted
high po/pi activity - paging to/from disk
po:fr - how badly the system is thrashing
sr:fr - how busy the VMM is trying to steal pages

cheers
Niel