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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T20:14:20+00:00

if I run top on a Linux system, I can see a lot of

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if I run 

top

on a Linux system, I can see a lot of information about memory usage.

Mem:  15736360k total,  8415332k used,  7321028k free,   174876k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,  2630508k cached

I was wondering: What is the “cached” attribute telling me? Seems like this is not being freed at all – is this normal behavior?

We’re running memcached for our web apps. Has this anything to do with it?

Matt

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can (and maybe should) also use the free command to print memory status:

                 total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        515568     504740      10828          0      44248     427800
-/+ buffers/cache:      32692     482876
Swap:       915664      64820     850844

    The “buffers/cache” line tells you how much RAM the kernel has currently used for various buffers and caches, mainly for disk I/O I think. This memory is available to programs if they need it, but until they do, it’s better utilized if the kernel uses it to buffer I/O than if just left to idle.

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