Memory usage

[Chris Miller]

On 3/6/07, Tez <binary_y2k2 at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Leonardo de Miranda Cabral wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I have a notebook with 1GB Ram memory. I was taking a look in the memory usage
> > of this notebook and guess what, with almost nothing  (applications) loaded
> > the memory that Kubuntu show as used with the 'free' command is 750MB.
> > How????? I even stopped X (kdm), apache2, postgresql, everything... I`m
> > getting crazy??!!! Why kubuntu don`t free this memory??? I went to a WinXP
> > SP2 box with 512MB RAM that my father has and with a lot of application
> > loaded it still hava free memory at about 200MB. For you guys help me lower
> > my memory usage here a some 'free' and 'ps' outputs. [1] and [2] are outputs
> > when nothing is loaded (neither X), and [3] and [4]  with some default
> > applications that usually starts with kde. Is this a kernel bug??? If can any
> > one help me or explain me this strange memory usage...
> >
> > ----------------- [1] -> free -m ---------------------------------------------
> >              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> > Mem:          1002        761        240          0         36        659
> > -/+ buffers/cache:         65        937
> > Swap:         2933          0       2933
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> _SNIP_
> Do you see that most of the RAM is used under "cached" ?
>
> That's the file cache, where often accessed files are stored in RAM,
> Take a look at my output of 'free -om':
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:    1511       1414        97            0           24            873
> Swap:   956           0           956
>
>
> See how over 800MB is used as cache, it's normal for most of your RAM to
> be cache, and it's actually a good thing to.
> It saves the system having to access the, relatively slow, disk to read
> some files.
> As soon as the system needs more memory, it will shrink the cache to
> free some.
> If you want to see how much of the RAM is used by applications, just
> take the cached amount from the used amount.
> So in your case, 761 MB - 659 MB = 102 MB used

htop does this for you.

jstalin at the-kremlin$ ~/ sudo apt-get install htop

-- 
It's not much, but it's what I call 127.0.0.1