If you are interested in human consumption, there's "free --human" which decided on useful units by itself. The "--human" switch is also available for "du --human" or "df --human" or "ls -l --human". It's often abbreviated as "-h", but not always, since that also often stands for "--help".
Thanks, I generally use free -m since my brain can unconsciously parse it after all these years. ls -lh is one of my learned commands though. I type it in automatically when analyzing things.
ls -lrt, ls -lSh and ls -lShr are also very common in my daily use, depending on what I'm doing.
So that 2M of used swap is completely irrelevant. Same on my laptop
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 31989 11350 4474 2459 16164 19708
Swap: 6047 20 6027
My syslog server on the other hand (which does a ton of stuff on disk) does use swap
Mem: 1919 333 75 0 1511 1403
Swap: 2047 803 1244
With uptime of 235 days.
If I were to increase this to 8G of ram instead of 2G, but for arguments sake had to have no swap as the tradeoff, would that be better or worse. Swap fans say worse.
> So that 2M of used swap is completely irrelevant.
As I noted somewhere, my other system has 2,5GB of SWAP allocated over 13 days. That system is a desktop system and juggles tons of things everyday.
I have another server with tons of RAM, and the Kernel decided not to evict anything to SWAP (yet).
> If I were to increase this to 8G of ram instead of 2G, but for arguments sake had to have no swap as the tradeoff, would that be better or worse. Swap fans say worse.
I'm not a SWAP fan, but I support its use. On the other hand I won't say it'd be worse, but it'd be overkill for that server. Maybe I can try 4, but that doesn't seem to be necessary if these numbers are stable over time.
This is from another system I have close:
2MB of SWAP used, 1423 MB RAM used, 29GB cache, 1042 MB Free. Total RAM 32 GB.