Help! Linux ate my Memory. Did it indeed?
I was curious where my memory had gone because, when I fired up a terminal and typed the command -
$ free -m
I got the following output.
total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 882 843 38 0 86 424 -/+ buffers/cache: 332 549 Swap: 0 0 0
From a total of 882 MB, 843 MB has been used leaving only a measly 38 MB free for my use. How is that possible ?
Linux Ate my RAM will help you figure out what is going on.
To paraphrase what the website says, the whole thing is just a play of words. What you consider free is indeed free, but Linux chooses to call it 'used' because this memory is both used for something and at same time available for applications. Since your and Linux's terminology differs, you think you are low on RAM - when you're not.
