It is quite well known that Linux (and other unices) tends to use as much as memory as possible. Once you read a file or a block on disk, it will be put in cache on memory, just in case...
Then, you may have some issues with free memory. For example, on a machine with 4GB of RAM:
free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3950 3540 409 0 698 1472 -/+ buffers/cache: 1368 2581 Swap: 4000 15 3984
We see / think that only 400 MB are free, and all is used (but we see that 1472 MB are cached).
In fact, a simple command can clean the memory cache. Run, as root:
sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
Once this is done, the memory used is much more comfortable:
free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3950 1407 2542 0 1 101 -/+ buffers/cache: 1304 2645 Swap: 4000 15 3984
Catégorie