increase in memory usage

[Kordula Martin <kordula@kordula.de>]

Hi,

I'm somewhat of a newbie, and have had Woody installed for about 2 months 
now.  I've been noticing something that raises a few questions - right 
after (re)booting my machine, I'll use 'top' to check the memory usage 
which is usaually something like 56xxx KB used, and then after 1 or 2 days 
I use 'top' again to check and the memory usage has jumped up to about 
230xxx KB used.  This is without making any changes to the running 
system.  I'm using the machine as a Web, FTP and email server, also 
Fetchmail running as a daemon, but there is not yet any real outside 
activity going on, and notice, I said no changes to the running system 
(from my side).

What can be (gradually) consuming all of this memory?
Can I expect this to increase to eventually use all of my 384 MB of RAM?
Is there something I can do to periodically free, or refresh, my (un-used) RAM?

All insight into this issue will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Kordula