Linux systems handle memory exceptionally well, though it's always possible for things to get out of hand if a process misbehaves or not enough memory was allocated. In such a situation where a system starts to perform sluggish, checking your available memory will probably be one of the first things you look into. To do this, we use the free command. To make the output even more readable, you can add the -m option, which shows your memory usage in terms of megabytes, which can make it much easier to read. Reading this output may be confusing at first, though I'm sure you'll find it straightforward after we go through the output.

The output of the free command

When running the free command, we're presented with three rows and six columns of information. The first row shows us our actual RAM usage, while the second row declares buffers and the third our swap usage. Under total, we see that this system has 7923 MB of RAM installed. Technically, this system has 8 GB of...