How do i see the actual memory usage?

[Andy Green]

Søren Neigaard wrote:
> Ok, this gives me:
> 
> ---------
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:       1033684    1008540      25144          0     210324     548616
> -/+ buffers/cache:     249600     784084
> Swap:      3156680        696    3155984
> ---------
> 
> Hm but..? Does this mean my system, running almost nothing, uses almost
> all my physical memory?

Top and free are showing the same information.  The answer to your
question is that "buffers" and "cached" reflect temporary usage of
'spare' memory.  A rough idea of how much memory is unallocated is

free + buffers + cached

- free is just sitting there totally unused

- buffers is something to do with storage space for data going to a
block device (?) anyway it is temporary allocation that can be kicked to
free up the memory

- cached is recently seen data from a block device that is kept around
in case it is needed again... it's totally lose-able to get the memory
free again if it is needed for something else.

-Andy

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