how to free tmpfs

[James Tharakan]

I am getting issues like no free memory
I am trying to find how to and from where can i delete the contents from the tmpfs
I tried restarting the machine which did not help.

df -kh
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 39G 20G 17G 55% /
/dev/sda3 186G 175G 1.4G 100% /rhel5pdi
tmpfs 755M 0 755M 0% /dev/shm

Thanks

[sourabh girdhar]

James,

As per your logs your tmpfs is 100% free and that is maintained automatically by OS and if sometimes it is full, restart can do the needful. Restart clears everything in tmpfs.

As per your output it is /dev/sda3 186G 175G 1.4G 100% /rhel5pdi which seems to be culprit.

[Stefan Wagner]

I'm not sure how RedHat manages memory, but afaik, tmpfs is something different from swap, and for free memory you need, if something from an harddrive, then swap.

Swap isn't measured and reported with df but with 'free':

free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1025996     947412      78584          0     137824     202856
-/+ buffers/cache:     606732     419264
Swap:       996020      45140     950880

To search for your swap space, you may use fdisk -l with sudo (sda3 on my system):

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda
[sudo] password for stefan: 

Platte /dev/sda: 40.0 GByte, 40007761920 Byte
255 Köpfe, 63 Sektoren/Spur, 4864 Zylinder
Einheiten = Zylinder von 16065 × 512 = 8225280 Bytes
Disk identifier: 0xcccdcccd

   Gerät  boot.     Anfang        Ende     Blöcke   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1         985     7911981    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2             986        1981     8000370   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            1982        2105      996030   82  Linux Swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4            2106        4864    22161667+   5  Erweiterte
/dev/sda5            2106        3101     8000338+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6            3102        4097     8000338+  83  Linux
/dev/sda7            4098        4864     6160896   83  Linux