1 .\" slabtop.1 - manpage for the slabtop(1) utility, part of procps-ng
3 .\" Copyright (C) 2003 Chris Rivera
4 .\" Licensed under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License, v2
5 .TH SLABTOP "1" "June 2011" "procps-ng" "User Commands"
7 slabtop \- display kernel slab cache information in real time
13 displays detailed kernel slab cache information in real time. It displays a
14 listing of the top caches sorted by one of the listed sort criteria. It also
15 displays a statistics header filled with slab layer information.
19 does not require any options. The behavior, however, can be fine-tuned by
20 specifying one or more of the following flags:
22 \fB\-d\fR, \fB\-\-delay\fR=\fIN\fR
23 Refresh the display every
25 in seconds. By default,
27 refreshes the display every three seconds. To exit the program, hit
30 \fB\-s\fR, \fB\-\-sort\fR=\fIS\fR
31 Sort by \fIS\fR, where \fIS\fR is one of the sort criteria.
33 \fB\-o\fR, \fB\-\-once\fR
34 Display the output once and then exit.
36 \fB\-V\fR, \fB\-\-version\fR
37 Display version information and exit.
39 \fB\-h\fR, \fB\-\-help\fR
40 Display usage information and exit.
42 The following are valid sort criteria used to sort the individual slab caches
43 and thereby determine what are the "top" slab caches to display. The default
44 sort criteria is to sort by the number of objects ("o").
46 The sort criteria can also be changed while slabtop is running by pressing
47 the associated character.
50 \fBcharacter description header\fR
51 a number of active objects ACTIVE
52 b objects per slab OBJ/SLAB
53 c cache size CACHE SIZE
54 l number of slabs SLABS
55 v number of active slabs N/A
57 o number of objects OBJS
59 s object size OBJ SIZE
60 u cache utilization USE
64 accepts keyboard commands from the user during use. The following are
65 supported. In the case of letters, both cases are accepted.
67 Each of the valid sort characters are also accepted, to change the sort
68 routine. See the section
88 requires a 2.4 or later kernel (specifically, a version 1.1 or later
90 Kernel 2.2 should be supported in the future.
92 The slabtop statistic header is tracking how many bytes of slabs are being
93 used and is not a measure of physical memory. The 'Slab' field in the
94 /proc/meminfo file is tracking information about used slab physical memory.
96 Written by Chris Rivera and Robert Love.
99 was inspired by Martin Bligh's perl script,
102 Please send bug reports to
103 .UR procps@freelists.org