Hi All,

I would not exactly consider myself a newbie but this is a bit of a newbie question so here it goes.

When I run top I see used memory and free memory. When I first boot the system there is lots of free memory in about a day or two that memory whittles down from 2GB of Free mem(of 4GB) to 20MB and then maintains 20-50MB of free memory. This seems to be consistent across different servers. At first I thought there had to be some major memory leaks but it just seemed to prevalent to not have been noticed before.

So reading these forums I found a better way to gauge memory usage is the use of the free command. Now I am confused though, what is Free memory as it is defined and monitored in top?

Thanks

Hi All,

Guess it just takes a few minutes to search the Internet and I found the answer, Disk cache uses up the memory and so the memory is not free, it is used for Disk cache, I assume that means that other programs that need the memory can pull from that disk cache memory and use it but top is still going to show it as used.

Thanks and sorry for spamming the forum

Correct.
I expect you will eventually be forgiven.

Searching for answers before you post to LQ is always a good idea

Memory classified as "buffers" or "cached" is essentially free memory as well, as you already found. Having the memory empty when it can be used to improve the performance would be a pitiful waste.