title: Kubernetes: understanding memory usage for "kubectl top node"
body: <p>How do I interpret the memory usage returned by "kubectl top node". E.g. if it returns:</p>
  
  <pre>
      NAME                   CPU(cores)   CPU%      MEMORY(bytes)   MEMORY%
      ip-XXX.ec2.internal    222m         11%       3237Mi          41%
      ip-YYY.ec2.internal    91m          9%        2217Mi          60%
  </pre>
  
  <p>By comparison, if I look in the Kubernetes dashboard for the same node, I get:
  Memory Requests: 410M / 7.799 Gi</p>
  
  <p><hr>
  <strong>kubernetes dashboard</strong></p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/uz0ZS.png" alt="[1]"></p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>How do I reconcile the difference?</p>