just added 512MB ram, now only have 114MB free?

[BigCletus]

I just put in 2 256MB and this is what cat /proc/meminfo gives me :

total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 525688832 408883200 116805632 2428928 77348864 118329344
Swap: 271392768 0 271392768
MemTotal: 513368 kB
MemFree: 114068 kB
MemShared: 2372 kB
Buffers: 75536 kB
Cached: 115556 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 29180 kB
Inact_dirty: 164284 kB
Inact_clean: 0 kB
Inact_target: 3920 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 513368 kB
LowFree: 114068 kB
SwapTotal: 265032 kB
SwapFree: 265032 kB
NrSwapPages: 66258 pages

so basicaly, i have 400MB being used and 114MB free? this is running X and nautilus with gnome, xterm, and mozilla. This cant be right. Also, what is Inact_dirty: 164284 kB? Thanks for any help.

[bdg1983]

You need at least 2GB of memory to run Linux with a couple of apps. ;)

total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 526635008 228401152 298233856 0 41504768 72491008
Swap: 139788288 0 139788288
MemTotal: 514292 kB
MemFree: 291244 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Buffers: 40532 kB
Cached: 70792 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 39816 kB
Inactive: 155076 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 514292 kB
LowFree: 291244 kB
SwapTotal: 136512 kB
SwapFree: 136512 kB

This is mine running Caldera Workstation 3.1, 2.4.16 kernel, X4.1 and KDE 2.2 with 2 instances of Konqueror (browser and filemanager), Konsole and Kmail running.

If you have a look/search for other posts here on the same question (it was just asked yesterday), you will find out how Linux actually uses it's unused memory for cache and buffers. Why waste what is not being used for applications.

[Jomboni]

That's really good to know! I just figured it was a huge memory hog :)

[Strike]

The secret command to tell how much memory you really have free:


free -m | grep s/c | awk '{print $4}'


Will give you your free memory in MB.