On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Jim Cunning wrote:
On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, Rowan Reid wrote:
2:38am up 23 days, 15:25, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 42 processes: 41 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: 0.7% user, 0.7% system, 0.0% nice, 98.4% idle Mem: 61992K av, 58900K used, 3092K free, 0K shrd, 13432K buff Swap: 192740K av, 9364K used, 183376K free 22804K cached
Linux uses free memory for buffers to speed access to recently used disk data. Whenever programs require additional memory, the kernel will release buffers to free memory.
This question has been asked many times and it HAS to be part of a FAQ somewhere. I spent about 10 minutes looking and didn't find a good one. Anybody have a URL they want to share?
I searched a bit without finding anything relevant, but this is a part of the official SuSE FAQ, which is found inside the CD cover. In my 7.2 Pro, it is the second last item in the FAQ list. If you look at the output from free, the amount of memory available for programs is the second number in the free column. Regards Ole