All memory not actually used by applications is automatically used as
hard disk cache. As soon as you load more programs the cache gets
smaller and when you close programs and access your hard disk afterwards
the cache gets bigger again. "free" does not distinguish between "real"
memory occupation and cache memory occupation. Some other programs (I
don't remember which) do.
Till
Steve Fox wrote:
> I have an IBM ThinkPad T20 with 256 MB of memory. I've noticed that
> 'free' seems to be waivering between 90 - 1000tilization no matter how
> many applications I have open. If I run top it shows:
>
> 9820 root 16 0 81316 41M 12056 R 0.9 16.6 45:51 X
> 14970 drfickle 14 0 1072 1072 812 R 0.9 0.4 0:00 top
> 9839 drfickle 12 0 7760 6756 4432 S 0.3 2.6 1:13
> gnome-panel-2
> 9866 drfickle 11 0 6088 5340 4168 S 0.3 2.0 0:32
> gnome-terminal
>
> which definitely doesn't add up to 100%.
>
> Can anyone clue me into why this would be happening? I'm current with
> Cooker as of yesterday (3/13).
>
> Thanks.
>
>
