Hi,

I've been using Linux for my online web server (run level 3) for several years, and I have noticed that the Operating System by itself consumes all the RAM memory of the server, no matter how much it has!

The moment I reboot the server the free memory is quite high, but it starts immediately to decrease little by little, even if no applications are running! The consecuence is that in a matter of hours or days, 99% of the 500Mb or 1Gb of RAM is used up!

I have tried to fix this by trying different distros, and by updating packages, but with no success. One of the servers had RedHat 9 with 1Gb, the other two had Centos (4.1 and 4.3) with 500Mb

So it seems to be a general issue with Linux, and I expect you all have noticed it (or can confirm it now by running 'free' from time to time after rebooting).

Is there any way to fix this?
I would appreciate very much any hints or help.

cached RAM? i rather have some things cached in RAM than paged to swap or having to be read from the harddrive, (RAM is faster) if you hve lots of RAM it is better to use it than to be sitting unused...

i'm always forgetting commands and syntaxes.

You need to understand a bit more about Linux memory management. Take a look here for a good article on this issue.