Hi all folks,That sounds about right, although I only have about 7MB free at the moment on my 512MB machine. The remainder of the "free" memory not being used by applications is about 190M inactive and 160M buffer cache. The inactive memory will get used if its needed by something else and the buffer cache is to save disk access (this is one of the reasons, if not the reason why, say, an 8M cache on a disk drive is a bit of a waste of time).
I am running 256MB RAM. After running the OS a while it drops to about
20MB free even closing all applications. I have to reboot the PC to
free it then it comes up to about 120MB free.
Linux likes to put all that memory you bought to good use. You should expect to see a very small amount free, no matter how much you install in the machine. A lot of memory is very useful. On my work machine where I have a gig available, I can grep an entire source tree in the blink of an eye as it all nicely fits in memory. Also, have you ever noticed that when you copy a file to a floppy it happens immediately and then several seconds later, the floppy light actually comes on? And the first time you read files from a USB flash device it's really slow, but the second time it's instant?
You should, on the other hand, worry if you manage to keep 120M free for any length of time -- for some reason Linux isn't able to find anything useful to store in it.
jch
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