What is hammering my memory?

[Chan Chung Hang Christopher]

Dotan Cohen 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

> 
> What might be eating all that memory? Thanks.
> 

The Linux kernel. It's normal. Most of your chewed up memory is taken up 
by the page cache. Nothing to worry about. The kernel will automatically 
free up memory as needed. The page cache attempts to save you from 
having to operate at hard disk speed (milliseconds) as opposed to RAM 
speed (microseconds) so if you want a culprit, it is the kernel. If you 
are really not happy about it using memory, set swappiness to zero.