fedora OS high memory usage

[Frank Cox]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 14:12:43 -0800 (PST)
Ravi Malghan <rmalghan at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi: I have installed Fedora 6 on a laptop with 756MB
> RAM. With no application started when the machine
> boots up, the top is saying that, 601308K is being
> used.

Type this:

free

Look at the second line of output data.

For example, this is what I have on this machine right now:

 $ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       2057836    1958356      99480          0      77972    1437864
-/+ buffers/cache:     442520    1615316
Swap:      2031608        344    2031264

I am using 442520k of memory, but 1962316k is actually occupied by my active
processes, plus what amounts to a cache of what I have been doing recently just
in case I might want to do it again soon.

Linux uses all available ram for that sort of a cache unless it is otherwise
required for something else whereupon it is immediately released and given to
the process that asked for it.


-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com