[i3] memory information in i3status

  • From: Rob <faorg-lists@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: i3-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2015 17:38:54 +0100

Hi,

This is something have found useful in other window managers, and further to
the comments in the i3status man page:

It is hard to measure memory in a way which is accurate or meaningful

I find MemAvailable from /proc/meminfo most useful, assuming I understand it
correctly. MemTotal-MemAvailable would be even better.

One reason for that is that I have not run out of memory in the last few years

Unfortunately I do reasonably often. Either because other users are running
programs on the machine, or particular processes are memory intensive (eg.
virtual machines, CAE applications)

Memory has become so cheap that even in my 4 year old notebook, I have 8 GiB
of RAM.

I have 12GiB but it is not cost effective to replace this before replacing the
machine. Some programs/data sets have their memory requirements increased as
hardware specs improve.

Another reason is that your operating system will do the right thing anyway

It tends to thrash the swap space because all the running processes can't fit
into physical RAM. Sometimes the situation is so bad I have to reboot the
machine. 'limit vmemoryuse' can help in some situations but not all. A quick
way of checking memory usage would help.

you are probably better off with a script doing that, which pops up an alert
when your RAM usage reaches a certain threshold

Maybe, but it would be nice if the option was built in anyway. I don't suppose
there is any way to add it as a user configuration?

thanks,
Rob

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  • » [i3] memory information in i3status - Rob