Hello, Please excuse me if this report is in the wrong place, but 'kernel' was the most relevant area I could find. Top reports that of 128M of ram, 82M are being used when no application other than top is being used. Stranger still, no individual program claims to be taking up this memory. Free reports the following (while I'm in Xwindows, running netscape & Gnome): total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 127788 123444 4344 110052 8416 57164 -/+ buffers/cache: 57864 69924 Swap: 136512 768 135744 What is going on here? 82M used with no apps running doesn't seem right. amcleod.edu
that is because of the kernel's buffer cache ... the kernel automatically uses a portion of unused memory to cache block devices (disks etc.) to improve I/O performance ... this memory will be released if/when other processes need access to it ...