slabtop (1)

Leading comments

slabtop.1 - manpage for the slabtop(1) utility, part of procps-ng

Copyright (C) 2003 Chris Rivera
Licensed under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License, v2

(The comments found at the beginning of the groff file "man1/slabtop.1".)

NAME

slabtop - display kernel slab cache information in real time

SYNOPSIS

slabtop [options]

DESCRIPTION

slabtop displays detailed kernel slab cache information in real time. It displays a listing of the top caches sorted by one of the listed sort criteria. It also displays a statistics header filled with slab layer information.

OPTIONS

Normal invocation of slabtop does not require any options. The behavior, however, can be fine-tuned by specifying one or more of the following flags:

-d, --delay=N

Refresh the display every n in seconds. By default, slabtop refreshes the display every three seconds. To exit the program, hit q.

-s, --sort=S

Sort by S, where S is one of the sort criteria.

-o, --once

Display the output once and then exit.

-V, --version

Display version information and exit.

-h, --help

Display usage information and exit.

SORT CRITERIA

The following are valid sort criteria used to sort the individual slab caches and thereby determine what are the "top" slab caches to display. The default sort criteria is to sort by the number of objects ("o").

The sort criteria can also be changed while slabtop is running by pressing the associated character.

character	description	header
a	number of active objects	ACTIVE
b	objects per slab	OBJ/SLAB
c	cache size	CACHE SIZE
l	number of slabs	SLABS
v	number of active slabs	N/A
n	name	NAME
o	number of objects	OBJS
p	pages per slab	N/A
s	object size	OBJ SIZE
u	cache utilization	USE

COMMANDS

slabtop accepts keyboard commands from the user during use. The following are supported. In the case of letters, both cases are accepted.

Each of the valid sort characters are also accepted, to change the sort routine. See the section SORT CRITERIA.

<SPACEBAR>

Refresh the screen.

Q

Quit the program.

FILES

/proc/slabinfo

slab information

SEE ALSO

free(1), ps(1), top(1), vmstat(8)

NOTES

Currently, slabtop requires a 2.4 or later kernel (specifically, a version 1.1 or later /proc/slabinfo). Kernel 2.2 should be supported in the future.

The slabtop statistic header is tracking how many bytes of slabs are being used and is not a measure of physical memory. The 'Slab' field in the /proc/meminfo file is tracking information about used slab physical memory.

AUTHORS

Written by Chris Rivera and Robert Love.

slabtop was inspired by Martin Bligh's perl script, vmtop.

REPORTING BUGS

Please send bug reports to