1 Apr
2002
1 Apr
'02
23:33
* dan (dan@edentify.com.au) [020401 15:26]:
According to "top" there are approx. 95 processes running in total. If I shutdown the database webserver the number of processes reduces to about 40 and the memory used figure is about 750mb. How can this be correct? Am I missing something here in the figures available using "top" and "free"? I have noticed that if I totally reboot the machine then it starts up again with about 70mb used for approx. 40 processes.
You aren't taking caching into account. Unused memory will be used to cache buffers so that can be written to disk later. See, for example, http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue30/tag_memleak.html -- -ckm