Re: Memory usage on debian

[Jason McCarty <bclg@iup.edu>]

So, I understand the output of "free" and all that, but can anyone
explain the behavior shown below? This after my computer has been up for
a couple hours, doing very little. It usually shows this behavior,
especially if I've run a lot of programs first. It seems like memory is
being reclaimed from somewhere (kernel data? X11?) without free knowing
about it.

  quaternion:~$ free
               total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
  Mem:        256104     251680       4424          0      67536      66640
  -/+ buffers/cache:     117504     138600
  Swap:            0          0          0
  quaternion:~$ ./src/crap 
  zsh: killed     ./src/crap
  quaternion:~$ free
               total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
  Mem:        256104      59900     196204          0       6828      13932
  -/+ buffers/cache:      39140     216964
  Swap:            0          0          0

For this test, I've turned off swap, and "crap" is a program that just
does "while (1) malloc(1000);". Note that apparent memory usage dropped
from 117M to 39M. Any explanations?

PS, please CC me on replies.

Thanks,

  Jason