What does buffered, cached, free, slab and used mean when monitoring memory use on GKE?
I am running some compute nodes on GKE and when I look on their memory usage in metrics explorer I see:
It is clear to me what used
and free
mean. But how about the other states?
The official documentation is quite terse on the subject.
Solution 1:
That is standard terminology of Linux Kernel management:
buffered
- Block device (e.g. harddisk) cache
cached
- Parked file data (file content) cache
slab
- Memory used by the kernel to cache data structures for its own use (caches like inode, dentry, etc)