Comments on: Linode’s Marketing Gimmick http://www.sirspanky.com/informative/linodes-marketing-gimmick/ Personal jorunal of a professional geek - James Pearce in Perth, Australia Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:58:07 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Jed Smith http://www.sirspanky.com/informative/linodes-marketing-gimmick/comment-page-1/#comment-5701 Jed Smith Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:37:30 +0000 http://www.sirspanky.com/?p=788#comment-5701 We use 1024 MB per GB, as everyone should. The disparity you're seeing is because you used a paravirtualized kernel -- something Slicehost does not support -- which differs in the way memory is reported to the VM. On a Linode 360 I use for development which is running 2.6.18, the memory reported by "free -k" is 368,860k (exactly 360 MB reported by "free -m"). On a Linode 720 that I use for my personal site, running paravirtualized 2.6.31, "free -k" reports 721,132k (704 MB reported by "free -m"). We're not sure why this occurs, but my best guess is that the memory the kernel uses or reserves for itself is no longer contained in the total RAM available count. We're still trying to narrow down why this occurs, but it is not a marketing gimmick. Feel free to e-mail me directly at jed at linode.com or open a ticket if you have any further questions; I guarantee you that we're not misleading you. We use 1024 MB per GB, as everyone should. The disparity you’re seeing is because you used a paravirtualized kernel — something Slicehost does not support — which differs in the way memory is reported to the VM.

On a Linode 360 I use for development which is running 2.6.18, the memory reported by “free -k” is 368,860k (exactly 360 MB reported by “free -m”). On a Linode 720 that I use for my personal site, running paravirtualized 2.6.31, “free -k” reports 721,132k (704 MB reported by “free -m”). We’re not sure why this occurs, but my best guess is that the memory the kernel uses or reserves for itself is no longer contained in the total RAM available count.

We’re still trying to narrow down why this occurs, but it is not a marketing gimmick. Feel free to e-mail me directly at jed at linode.com or open a ticket if you have any further questions; I guarantee you that we’re not misleading you.

]]>