Top says I have ~9 mb of ram free and 167mb of swap.
On Linux, and other modern UNIX-based systems, "free" ram generally means wasted ram. Stuff is cached in ram for as long as possible.
My machine says:
Mem: 515636k total, 510116k used, 5520k free, 9272k buffers Swap: 1148576k total, 0k used, 1148576k free, 201036k cached
So 200MB is actually cached - programs I've run recently - files I've opened recently. Most of the 300MB is taken up by open office, a couple of big Java apps, X, mozilla and thunderbird. Note, though, that processes (i.e. running programs) will share memory (executable code mostly - like libraries) with each other.
Cheers, Carl.
