Why is not all memory used?

[Iain Stevenson]

--On Sunday, June 30, 2002 1:46 pm -0700 "Timothy A. Seufert" 
<tas@mindspring.com> wrote:

> 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. --

That's possible at the moment because I have been running a number of 
fairly chunky applications.  However, I used to get seemingly better memory 
utilisation out of the 320M - the 'free' memory always seemed to be next to 
nothing - rather than the 218592 now.

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        512476     293884     218592          0      90292      67016

Previous discussions on the list (and elsewhere) seem to suggest that Linux 
always keeps almost all of the memory active.  Has the memory handling 
changed a lot recently?

  Iain