What is hammering my memory?

[J]

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 10:00, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On my daily driver Dell Inspiron laptop I have been testing Kubuntu
> 10.10. Both alphas hammer the memory terribly:
> merkat1 at dcl:~$ free -m
>             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:          2011       1927         83          0          0       1228
> -/+ buffers/cache:        699       1312
> Swap:         2863          0       2862
> merkat1 at dcl:~$

Are you asking because of the numbers, or are you asking because your
system is doing something weird (like running slowly?)

You aren't using any swap, so you aren't using all the RAM.  The free
output looks like it should look.

Linux tends to cache a lot of data in RAM until you either use that
data again, or a running application needs that RAM for some reason,
then the cached areas are flushed and the freed RAM is allocated to
whatever process uses it.

It's quite normal to see memory usage at near 100%.  In fact, you
should learn a little about the output of FREE...

You have 2011 MB, with 1927 MB used.  And 1228MB cached.  So, that
means you are really only using 1927 - 1228 = 699MB...

Here, this is an old post, (2003) but it explains it fairly well:

http://aplawrence.com/Bofcusm/2118.html

Cheers,

Jeff