Free memory disappearing
 

Ever since I upgraded to kernel 2.6.2 my free memory has been steadily going down.
On 2.4.22 is was *not* acting this way which is making me wonder what is going on.
It will gradually go down.... and down..... although I don't know to what point since I have done this recently.

But anyway, here's some system info for anyone that understands linux memory usage.

I have 2gb of ram (and yes large mem support is enable in kernel)
using debian if that helps at all

there's a *current* output of a "cat /proc/meminfo" below....
(notice only a little more than 1gb is reported free out of 2)

There may be some simple answer to what I'm seeing but just don't know how to look at it correctly.

Thanks for any help anyone can offer.

MemTotal: 2071768 kB
MemFree: 1135152 kB
Buffers: 38308 kB
Cached: 553768 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 535252 kB
Inactive: 237736 kB
HighTotal: 1179072 kB
HighFree: 440640 kB
LowTotal: 892696 kB
LowFree: 694512 kB
SwapTotal: 0 kB
SwapFree: 0 kB
Dirty: 144 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
Mapped: 220740 kB
Slab: 146716 kB
Committed_AS: 280388 kB
PageTables: 1288 kB
VmallocTotal: 114680 kB
VmallocUsed: 21516 kB
VmallocChunk: 92016 kB

+


as you can see here, you have close to 600 megs of memory in buffer/cache ....
so you basically have 1.7 gigs of free ram adding this to the MemFree ....

read what i said here to get a better grasp to how this all works ...

thanks alot..... that was VERY helpful

much appreciated

:)