Why do NoRM and SEG.NLM Report Memory Differently?

  • 3410233
  • 25-Sep-2006
  • 26-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell NetWare 6.5
Novell NetWare 6.0
Novell NetWare 5.1
Novell NetWare Remote Manager
SEG.NLM

Situation

Novell Remote Manager (NoRM) and SEG.NLM (see https://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/14445.html) report different amounts of available memory.

For example, when comparing the following, different results are displayed:

NoRM (https://:8009/) -> Diagnose Server -> Health Monitor -> Available Memory
SEG.NLM -> Available Cache Memory

Resolution

NoRM calculates Available Memory using the formula Available Memory = cc + fd + fclp + fcvm + fcavm + fcalp where

cc = Current number of Cache Buffers in the file system address space
fd = Free Dirty pages
fclp = Free Clean L==P pages
fcvm = Free Clean VM pages
fcavm = Free Cache VM pages
fcalp = Free Cache L==P pages

The result is in pages, so take this result and multiply it by 4096 to turn pages into bytes.

All of these numbers are available from SEG:

Go to the "Memory Pool Information" screen ( from the main screen) and the numbers are all available here in the right-hand column; i.e. Free clean *, Free cache *, Free dirty pages. The current cache from FS, is in the left column at the top titled "available".

The following diagram illustrates this. NoRM (in red) is further broken down in SEG.NLM (in blue):