Top showing huge number in place of memory percentage

memoryramtop

Today I decided to run top on my Arch Linux laptop, to be greeted with this:

what even

In particular, this bothers me:

even what-er

GiB Mem :225809113546752.0/7.791

This number doesn't change with the actual memory consumption.

Does anyone have any idea why this occurs?

Best Answer

The problem is known and fixed already - top: protect against the anomalous 'Mem' graph display

Until this patch, top falsely assumed that there would always be some (small) amount of physical memory after subtracting 'used' and 'available' from the total. But as the issue referenced below attests, a sum of 'used' and 'available' might exceed that total memory amount.

The bug was patched a month ago, but the Arch Linux's procps-ng package was built in the 10.07.2016. So, the simple system upgrade won't help in this case.

You have two ways to solve this problem at least:

  1. Building the last version of the procps-ng from the source.
  2. Using htop or another analog for system monitoring.
Related Question