<p>It is reporting the memory statistics of the <em>locked</em> memory pool, not all memory used in general.</p>
<p>The locked pool is used to store private keys and other security-sensitive material. Bitcoin Core requests from the OS that the memory used by this locked pool is not swapped out, to prevent it from ending up on a swapfile/swap partition on disk.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-01-26T20:39:15.250Z
thanks for this info. I see that running `cat /proc/$PID/status  | grep VmLck` returns `VmLck:        64 kB`, which is in-line with the `65536` I saw earlier.
Logan M.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-01-25T19:20:22.013Z
2021-01-25T19:20:22.013Z
Pieter Wuille
<p>What does the output of the RPC call <code>getmemoryinfo</code> actually mean? For example, this is from my node running in Docker. Does that mean the <code>bitcoind</code> process inside the container is only using <code>64272</code> bytes of memory? That's only 64k, that can't be correct, right?</p>
<pre><code>{
  &quot;result&quot;: {
    &quot;locked&quot;: {
      &quot;used&quot;: 64272,
      &quot;free&quot;: 1264,
      &quot;total&quot;: 65536,
      &quot;locked&quot;: 65536,
      &quot;chunks_used&quot;: 2002,
      &quot;chunks_free&quot;: 2
    }
  },
  &quot;error&quot;: null,
  &quot;id&quot;: &quot;curltest&quot;
}
</code></pre>
<p>These are the processes inside the container.</p>
<pre><code>/ $ ps -a
PID   USER     TIME  COMMAND
    1 bitcoind 12:52 bitcoind -zmqpubrawblock=tcp://0.0.0.0:28332 -zmqpubrawtx=tcp://0.0.0.0:28333
   43 bitcoind  0:00 /bin/sh
   51 bitcoind  0:00 ps -a
</code></pre>

<bitcoin-core><bitcoind><json-rpc><memory>
What does the RPC call "getmemoryinfo" show?
Logan M.
# What does the RPC call "getmemoryinfo" show?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2021-01-25)

What does the output of the RPC call `getmemoryinfo` actually mean? For example, this is from my node running in Docker. Does that mean the `bitcoind` process inside the container is only using `64272` bytes of memory? That's only 64k, that can't be correct, right?

```
{
  "result": {
    "locked": {
      "used": 64272,
      "free": 1264,
      "total": 65536,
      "locked": 65536,
      "chunks_used": 2002,
      "chunks_free": 2
    }
  },
  "error": null,
  "id": "curltest"
}

```

These are the processes inside the container.

```
/ $ ps -a
PID   USER     TIME  COMMAND
    1 bitcoind 12:52 bitcoind -zmqpubrawblock=tcp://0.0.0.0:28332 -zmqpubrawtx=tcp://0.0.0.0:28333
   43 bitcoind  0:00 /bin/sh
   51 bitcoind  0:00 ps -a

```

**Tags:** bitcoin-core, bitcoind, json-rpc, memory


---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2021-01-25. Score: 4 | Accepted answer

It is reporting the memory statistics of the *locked* memory pool, not all memory used in general.

The locked pool is used to store private keys and other security-sensitive material. Bitcoin Core requests from the OS that the memory used by this locked pool is not swapped out, to prevent it from ending up on a swapfile/swap partition on disk.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: thanks for this info. I see that running `cat /proc/$PID/status  | grep VmLck` returns `VmLck:        64 kB`, which is in-line with the `65536` I saw earlier.  

---

