Being new to a RedHat machine running on VMWare. I have a question. Maybe a silly question but I have never seen this before. Maybe my new job the server load is greater than I have seen in the past.

Here is the output from top:

Tasks: 7782 total, 1 running, 7781 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.9%us, 1.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 95.9%id, 0.8%wa, 0.2%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 32829000k total, 32599560k used, 229440k free, 93288k buffers
Swap: 50331636k total, 152k used, 50331484k free, 13798952k cached

Is it normal for the memory 95% used as long as the swap stays low?

System is Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.5 (Tikanga)

Hi.

You've actually got about 14GB free.

Run 'free' and check the '-/+ buffers/cache' line.

Dave

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 32829000 32667484 161516 0 84192 14385576
-/+ buffers/cache: 18197716 14631284
Swap: 50331636 152 50331484

I see that I have 14GB free. Maybe I don't understand the Mem: line then.
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 32829000 32667484 161516 0 84192 14385576

It only has 161516 free. Please explain this?

Have a look at this

Hi again.

Linux aggressively caches filesystem data - data which can immediately be dropped if it's needed by applications. The mem line shows the memory in-use including that cache data (which is really available), and the -/+ buffers/cache line shows the memory in-use when the caches are taken into account.

Ignore the mem line, just look at the -/+ buffers/cache line.

Dave

Thank you all for your prompt answers. They were very helpful.