memory reporting in Conky is sometimes wrong

[Member seaken64]

I recently installed “antiX-19.2_386-full Hannie Schaft 27 March 2020” in a VirtualBox Virtual Machine. It is working well. (I wanted to see what some of the new features were like, such as the Updater on the toolbar).

I am used to looking at the Conky to see the RAM used. After boot, and after letting it settle in, it shows 105M. But I noticed that after some work it ends up quite a bit higher and when I compare it to “free” and “HTOP” the number is off. This happened a couple of times and I rebooted and the ram use matches “free” and “HTOP” for a while. And then after a while it is showing a higher number, by about 30 or 50 MBs.

This is unusual for me. I usually get a pretty good idea from Conky but now I am unsure of whether it is reliable or not. Is the Conky RAM used feature different in this version of antiX-19? Is there a setting I can change to get the Conky RAM used readout to be closer to reality (closer to what is reported by “free” and “HTOP”)?

Seaken64

[Member seaken64]

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I haven’t figured out why the Conky doesn’t report the memory in the same way as “free”. But I can use the “MEM” icon on the taskbar to check up on the memory. It’s actually better than the Conky since it doesn’t get obscured by a window. I’ll learn to adjust. I haven’t noticed if the MEM icon also varies by as much as the Conky does. I’ll keep an eye on it.

Seaken64

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Conky does have quite a few settings. Perhaps the update interval can be modified to minimize differences.
Each Conky view has its own configuration and the files in the configuration include images and configuration scripts. It is the script for a specific Conky view that you may want to edit.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by Brian Masinick.

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Brian Masinick

[Member ModdIt]

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Hi all, masinik is right, actually conky has a lot of possibilitys. Too many to list here.
The mem update interval is usualy set to a value which consumes low system recources, conky
can display about anything you might wish for but too much can really slow down a low end machine.

On Antix you should have a .conkyrc in your home which you can optimise as wished for.

http://conky.sourceforge.net/config_settings.html
http://conky.sourceforge.net/variables.html
http://conky.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

Gives very useful info.

[Forum Admin Dave]

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I always thought they were the same, just one output was MiB and the other MB…
There are a few different ways of measuring ram usage as well and what is included in the reading as really all the ram is used IIUC.

You may find that dumping the cached pages and such will “align” the readings.

Running
cat /proc/meminfo
should give you a list that you can filter through yourself. You might find that you can add and subtract those numbers to make up the output of the the other programs.

Computers are like air conditioners. They work fine until you start opening Windows. ~Author Unknown

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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According to these standards, technically a megabyte (MB) is a power of ten, while a mebibyte (MiB) is a power of two, appropriate for binary machines. A megabyte is then 1,000,000 bytes. A mebibyte is the actual 1,048,576 bytes that most intend. ‘”Dec 23, 2001

A video explanation is here:
https://youtu.be/Dqt7fsvw1-8

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Brian Masinick

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