I will post the output from free later. I rebooted recently, so the usage is not quite up there yet. However, I think that your free output is rather alarming too. You should not have 500 megs used, unless you are say, running a server with many, many concurrent connections.
You're not getting it yet... Of my 500MB used, almost 100 MB was disk buffers, and 250MB are cached files. This memory is used by the kernel to store recently used data from the disk because:
1) nothing else is using it
2) disk access is millions of times slower than RAM access.
Wasting that RAM by leaving nothing in it would only hurt your computer's performance. All modern operating systems make use of spare RAM to cache files from disk. This is perfectly normal.
You are allready using swap space too.
Sure, 16 MB. It's not significant. For the most part, it's probably initilization code in kernel drivers, the init process, or long-running daemons. It's code that's used once and never used again.
Swap use, by itself, is not a problem either. It's OK to swap out a chunk of code that is never used. Swap only becomes a problem when active processes are swapped out, because those must later be swapped back in. The process of swapping active applications in and out of disk is extrememly slow.
Reboot your computer and see how much memory is used right away. As for the caches, I thought that those were referring to the CPU caches.
They refer to disk caches.
If the numbers refer to bytes (vice kilobytes), mine totals to 640K. If the are KB, then maybe you are on to something.
So you're saying that you have 640MB of memory being used for cache... Is there a reason you're worried about this? Were there performance problems after the system had been running for a day? Were you seeing a lot of disk activity due to swap? It doesn't sound like it. ;)
Fwiw, the man page isn't very clear on it.
From 'man free': -k, --kb Display output in kilobytes (KB). This is the default.
Thanks for replying though. Know of any good linux memory tools out there?
Lots of them.
free and top from the command line.
Both KDE and GNOME have a "system monitor" under the "System Tools" in the Red Hat menu.
meminfo is a memory leak detector intended for developers. Valgrind is another.
Depends on what you want from a "memory tool".
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