Hi,

Oflate, I have noticed some thing unusual.

I have copied a huge file (> 1 MB) from one partition (/) to another mounted partition. The strange thing is that after the successful copy, I have seen a loss of main memory in the order of 50KB to 1MB. I have observed MemFree from /proc/meminfo getting decreased each time I do a copy.

Why should main memory be lost when copying is being done to a different mounted partion?

Details of my system:

System Details:
Linux 2 2.4.20 mips unknown

Appreciate your valuble inputs.

TIA
--Ram

What you are seeing are the disk buffers. This number (which appears as 'shared') represents storage that is being used to keep copies of information that has been recently read from disk, in anticipation that, should the same piece of data be needed again [a likely prospect...], a second disk-read will not be required.

You need not be alarmed by this; it is perfectly normal.

Under normal conditions, Linux will always use all of the memory that it has available, trying to put it to good use for something. If and when memory pressure develops, disk-buffers are among the first to go.