RAM, or lack thereof.

[snuck]

I'm running Gentoo on XP1800, 512MB RAM, and a Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra motherboard, and regularly only have comparatively little ram. It pissed me off enough today to add up all the percentages of memory that were being used, according to top, which came to 10.something% and yet, still according to top, over 400 MB were being used. At the time i did this i had just logged in and top was the first command i typed. the box has been up for about 36 hours. This was from a regular top, ie. with no options invoked or anything, and I don't know if you have to do something to make it show everything, though a brief read of the man page didn't lead me to believe so.

So, I am little confused, any help in accounting for the discrepancy would be much appreciated.

[Hayl]

you have to subtract the buffers and cache from the amount used to get the true amount of RAM that is ebing used.

[snuck]

Thanks. for getting back so quick.

Where abouts could I look to find out how much the buffers, and cache are taking up?

[Hayl]

cat /proc/meminfo or it is displayed in top on the right hand side near the top.

[bwkaz]

Run free

Look in the +/- buffers/cache row, in the "used" and "free" columns.

[snuck]

Thanks everyone. :)