Wow. Thanks for the help. That clears things up a lot. I guess what got me going was the gnome cpu monitor app for the taskbar was showing a very high percentage of RAM use, so that got me looking around.
Yes, it isn't terribly clear about the distinction between application memory use and buffers/cache. Less so, even, than the old UNIX tools. Since GNOME strives to make users' lives simple, and not confuse them, that should perhaps be filed as a bug.
So, I would say then that the app should display "application RAM" instead of RAM caching of hard disk data.
/me nods.
I have used free and top quite a lot while tracking this down (look at the subject line of this thread :) ) Since they report the same thing, I didn't find it useful (in fact, due to my misunderstanding, it convinced me of what I falsely believe to be a memory leak).
It is, perhaps, the most FAQ about UNIX systems.
I guess the question I still have is the use of swap space. When I first boot up, free (and top) report that I have all of my swap space available and that none of it has been used. Once I start using up more RAM, presumably from caching HD data, I then start using some swap space. I guess I would have figured that the OS would realize that "hey, I haven't used that cache data for a very long time. Why don't I just take some of that RAM back instead of opening up some swap space?"
Probably because the cached data has been used more recently than the code pages that get swapped out. If nothing's using that data, there's no real reason to keep it in memory. The cache is more useful, and unlike users, the kernel is not allergic to swap use ;)
Gordon, thank you for your excellent help, and playing tag with me all day here. I'll stop rebooting my computer twice a day and find other things to worry about :)
An excellent plan :)
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