What is the meaning of size for the numactl --hardware output

Question

Does anyone know the exact meaning of "node size" for "numactl --hardware" output. I'm asking because I expected this memory value to be fixed but it changes slightly on some of my hosts. There have been no changes to the numa profile.

e.g.

$ numactl --hardware
available: 2 nodes (0-1)
node 0 cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
node 0 size: 46963 MB
node 0 free: 22655 MB
node 1 cpus: 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
node 1 size: 48360 MB
node 1 free: 37787 MB
node distances:
node   0   1
  0:  10  21
  1:  21  10

Answer 1

I think that would be the size of the shared L3 cache. You can confirm this by running lstopo or cat /proc/cpuinfo to look at the L3 cache size from sources other than numactl.