A couple off hours ago the free applet has been removed from busybox in openpli .
mentionning it's an evil applet ??
Actually it is not an evil applet at all. It is just one off the easiest ways to find out memory use problems (should the to much memory usage being the cause off crashes)
There is well only one remark about this applet,
In Linux, free command is used to get the information about the physical memory usage. However, understanding the output of free command is little tricky.
More detail in :
http://www.thegeekscope.com/check-linux-memory-usage-using-free-command/
By some other toppics about this applet, They do just say that the command is not really understood by new linux users but what is worse is that many administartors and developpers do not understand this command. And yes the result here one dev calls it evil ?
It is actually a very very ussefull tool to see pretty fast if There is a memory use and or capacity problem.
First in a eye look can bee seen if swap spaced has been allocated and if it is really used or not . (the fact is it used gives you already valuabel info,)
The base free memory is not enough to run all applications. But even if it has been used , It just could have been a temporary situation. Cause two applications started and have had a short term use off memory which will be just set back too free or just in buffers or caches and will be released if it becomes needed some where else. In this last case ussually it would just have helped to avoid a temporarely freeze off box.
But first What is now may real avbl memory to applications
Well just the sum off the free memory showed, But you must add to that the cache and buffers which are used by core they will will be freed up on demand.