Thanks for all the replies! It all makes sense now.
but I'll also take look at the archives for toher info :) Many Thanks, Melinda On Wed, 24 Jul 2002, Andrew Bennetts wrote: ::On Wed, Jul 24, 2002 at 11:57:34AM +1000, Melinda Taylor wrote: ::> ::> I just noticed after using dump that 100% of the memory in my system is ::> now in use. I check this also on my linux laptop, after using ::> 'dump' my 412 MB ram had only 12k free. ::> ::> The command free shows: ::> ::> total used free shared buffers cached ::> Mem: 514328 502352 11976 0 4476 345684 ::> -/+ buffers/cache: 152192 362136 ::> Swap: 875500 0 875500 :: ::This is actually fine. :: ::The line that matters in free is the "-/+ buffers/cache" line, which ::shows how much memory is available to applications (by adjusting for how ::much memory is used for the disk cache). So looking at it again, we ::see: :: ::> -/+ buffers/cache: 152192 362136 :: ::So your apps are using about 150Mb, and you still have about 360Mb free. :: ::If you look at the top line, you'll notice about 340Mb is used for ::"cached", which make sense after running dump, because you've done lots ::of disk activity. Linux keeps as much of the disk in memory as ::possible, because RAM is much faster than disk. However, if more RAM is ::needed for a program, Linux will discard parts of its cache to do so. :: ::Another sign that you don't need to worry is the "Swap" line shows 0 ::bytes used, which means your system hasn't swapped anything out to disk, ::which is only done when real physical RAM is running low. :: ::I hope this makes it a little clearer. There's a lack of good, clear, ::non-technical documentation about what those numbers actually mean. :: ::Regards, :: ::-Andrew. :: ::-- ::SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ ::More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug :: -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug