Surprisingly high memory utilization

cyberblak · 05-02-2006, 09:23 PM

Hi,

I have a P3 computer equiped with 512Mb of memory. The systems starts the basic daemons, networking, etc. and a X terminal running a quite lightweight app (no desktop, windows manager, etc.).

However, when I run top, free or vmstat, it reports that more than 95% is used. When I look at the processes list (as reported by top, sorted by memory utilization), there's only a little bit more than 22Mb used by the running processes.

Any idea??

Thanks,

cyberblak

TomaCzar · 05-02-2006, 09:40 PM

Unless I'm missing something here, you're making hte same mistake I did ( http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=154455 ) and not accounting for the fact that disk cache intentionally uses up free memory. Hopefully this answers your question and thanx for the walk down memory lane (that was my very first thread *SNIFF*).

-TomaCzar

cyberblak · 05-02-2006, 10:28 PM

Well, I guess that answers my question!

I get more than half the memory free now.

Thanks a lot!!!

cyberblak