top - gives conflicting output

[0x001A4]

I want to know what process is taking how much memory. top is giving me very odd results.

I have this for mem usage:

Mem:  2059640k total, 2042472k used, 17168k free, 98224k buffers

So I'm using 99% of my physical memory.

In my list of processes I have 4 processes that are using any memory at all.
X is using 4.1%, top is using 0.1%, ktorrent is using 1.7%, and vmware-vmx is using 28.6%. So that gives me a total of 34.5% of my memory being used. Where is the rest of it being used? How do I find out?

[daark.child]

I think to get a better idea about how top and other tools report memory usage, take a look here. Usually all the memory on your system appears to be used, but thats because the kernel caches disk access (I understand other OSes do this as well, but to varying levels).

[vsemaska]

What daark.child said is correct, Linux like other OSes will use most of the unused memory for disk cache. You get a better breakdown of the memory if you cat /etc/meminfo

# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 255532 kB
MemFree: 8968 kB
Buffers: 51920 kB
Cached: 71480 kB
SwapCached: 18024 kB
Active: 148132 kB
Inactive: 63332 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 255532 kB
LowFree: 8968 kB
SwapTotal: 4194296 kB
SwapFree: 4137936 kB
Dirty: 76 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
Mapped: 104512 kB
Slab: 14792 kB
CommitLimit: 4322060 kB
Committed_AS: 626800 kB
PageTables: 1768 kB
VmallocTotal: 761848 kB
VmallocUsed: 14136 kB
VmallocChunk: 746484 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
Hugepagesize: 4096 kB

[0x001A4]

Thanks for the link, daark.child. That was very informative. It actually answered everything I was confused about.

vsemaska, the output of cat /proc/meminfo was just about as useful to me as top before I read that particular article. Now that I've read it, meminfo makes a lot more sense to me as well.

Thanks for the help!