Why is not all memory used?

[Timothy A. Seufert]

At 8:59 PM +0100 6/30/02, Iain Stevenson wrote:
>I upgraded the memory in my 9600 system to 512M (from 320M) recently and
>now it seems not to use all of the memory available.  It also starts to
>use swap after a while even though lots of free RAM is available.  Here
>is /proc/meminfo:
>
>        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
>Mem:  524775424 278798336 245977088        0 68919296 68943872
>Swap: 104853504  5517312 99336192

Have you started and subsequently quit any big memory chewers?  This 
just looks like what happens after a large program that forced a lot 
of swapping has quit: stuff that got swapped out to make room for the 
monster is still swapped out (it will not be swapped back in until 
there is a need for it), and now there's a big chunk of physical RAM 
free which the monster had been occupying.
-- 
Tim Seufert