hello all;

i have problem with memory usage. When i check it with top command , system is using 506404k from 512540k but in percent it shows only 15%. There is running only kde, firefox and apache. It seems like memory usage only increasing but never decreasing.

Mem: 512540k total, 506404k used, 6136k free, 72072k buffers
Swap: 1056312k total, 3452k used, 1052860k free, 193820k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
19221 root 15 0 199m 61m 5320 S 3.7 12.3 16:17.12 X
32013 duben 15 0 119m 75m 19m S 1.0 15.0 3:57.30 firefox-bin
32154 duben 15 0 31528 15m 11m S 1.0 3.0 0:02.83 konsole
19283 duben 15 0 25672 10m 8416 S 0.3 2.1 0:00.55 klipper
1 root 16 0 708 264 232 S 0.0 0.1 0:01.71 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 ksoftirqd/0
3 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.91 events/0
4 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
5 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthread
7 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.15 kblockd/0
8 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
75 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 khubd
77 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
184 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.24 pdflush
186 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.97 kswapd0
187 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0
188 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 jfsIO
189 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 jfsCommit
190 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 jfsSync
191 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 xfslogd/0
192 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 xfsdatad/0
877 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata/0
886 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_2
887 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_3
900 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 exec-osm/0
905 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 block-osm/0
912 root 17 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khpsbpkt
948 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_4
968 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kcryptd/0
974 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.60 reiserfs/0
1139 root 14 -4 2056 828 432 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.55 udevd
1917 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 shpchpd
1918 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kgameportd
2207 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kpsmoused

Memory usage in Linux isn't what it seems. Here's an explanation, hope it helps:

http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2...-on-linux.html

it's just disk buffers and cache, the fields on the top right, it's no problem. disk caching is very low priority as far as your system is concerned, and generally speeds things up when it's being used.
it looks like it's using about 250 megs of otherwise unused ram, which is reasonable, I have a gig and it uses about 500, I also have a server with only 256 and it uses almost no memory for cache.
the memory will be availiable for applications when you need it.