Ravi Malghan wrote:
Hi: I have installed Fedora 6 on a laptop with 756MB RAM. With no application started when the machine boots up, the top is saying that, 601308K is being used.
Mem: 774356k total, 601308k used, 173048k free, 19348k buffers
Is this normal? or is this not really what it means. I read some postings that the memory usage shown here is what is allocated for the processes and not how much is being used.
Any thoughts? Thanks Ravi
It looks fairly normal - the amount of free memory is a bit high, unless the system has not been up very long. Linux will use memory that is not needed for programs for buffers and disk cache. This tends to speed up operations, especially disk access if what you want is still in the cache. This is a better then letting memory sit unused.
The second line of the free command shows how much is used by programs, and how much can be freed for program use. Freeing up memory used for disk cache is normally fast, and buffers not too much slower.
Mikkel