Jeff,
The 74MB used memory that you see is not the actual memory usage coz that
includes buffered and cached memory which will be given away to
applications if needed. The standard way of a unix system to allocate
memory is to allocate as much memory as possible .. so most of the memory
is used up for caching and buffering.. but given away to applications on
demand. To get the correct perspective, type free in console..
u'll get a output like :
~ > free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 517044 513296 3748 308260 166096 161724
-/+ buffers/cache: 185476 331568
Swap: 1044184 11936 1032248
~ >
My used memory (seen by top and others) is 513MB, but the actual used
memory is only 185MB.. that means the remaing is used as buffer and cache
by the kernel. Thus, an application needing the remaining memory will get
it as and when it asks for it.. but when no application is running, the
linux kernel is intelligent enuff to make full use of the remaining unused
memory! I hope you got that!
The advantage of caching and buffering is that.. say u open a file.. it
will be in the memory as a cache.. so even if u close the application that
was reading/using the file, and u reopen the app and reopen the same file
again, it'll be opened instantly coz it was in the memory! thus increasing
speed tremendously!
And as someone suggested, use xosview.. its an excellent little app to
monitor u're resources!
-sarang
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