On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Philip Webb <purs...@ca.inter.net> wrote:
> 090816 Raul Gonzales wrote: > > I have a 2G of physical RAM but even without any major activity > > output of free,vmstat and top reports only ~64M free. > > > > free -m > > total used free shared buffers cached > > Mem: 1953 1888 65 0 143 1557 > > -/+ buffers/cache: 187 1765 > > Swap: 2055 0 2055 > > The crucial figure is '187', which is what is usable. > You have a lot of something cached: any idea what it might be ? > -- the kernel should delete that stuff, if it needs the space. > > All Disk I/O is cached into memory. A good example is if you are playing a video game. Every time you load a new map, that map is cached in memory, so if you load that map again, the kernel won't get it from disk, but from the memory's cache. If your OS needs more ram, the cache is over-written with actual memory. Here is a simple explaination of what I'm talking about: http://linux.about.com/od/lsa_guide/a/gdelsa44.htm
