I'm working with a machine remotely (via ssh, yes updated)
and trying to understand how memory usage is reported.

I read through many other postings and still needed to ask:

This machine has 512 MB RAM, but I see the following:

cat /proc/meminfo:

MemTotal: 481256 kB
MemFree: 8512 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Buffers: 169048 kB
Cached: 144820 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 194264 kB
Inactive: 207556 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 481256 kB
LowFree: 8512 kB
SwapTotal: 2032212 kB
SwapFree: 2032212 kB

======
free:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 481256 472656 8600 0 168908 144812
-/+ buffers/cache: 158936 322320
Swap: 2032212 0 2032212

=====

Please tell me I'm failing to understand this information (!)
Otherwise, I'm led to believe that the kernel is hogging up approx. 30 MB of RAM ... ???



Suse 8.0

AMD Athlon XP 1800+
running at 1.533 GHz
512 MB RAM installed

I'd say it was taking 40M of RAM (481256/1024 = 469.9765)

I also use this to show kernel memory:

cat /var/log/dmesg | grep -A8 Memory

But I'm no expert on this subject, I'm trying to figure out a memory problem of my own:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=95873

you can run dmesg or look at the messages file. every boot it should dump out all the cpu and memory stuff. See if you can get it to add up...it may not be exact as memory is allocated in pages (typically 1024K pages). Hope it helps a little.