[David Boooth]

Hi:

I would like to know if this in normal linux behavor.
I am very new to the world of linux and am not sure if what I am seing is correct of if it is a problem.

Below is a copy of a top command. Is in normal to have this little "Free" memory and alot of memory in the buffer and cache. I see this a me have 500+ meg of memory and only 4 meg free.

9:03am up 45 days, 23:58, 2 users, load average: 0.05, 0.16, 0.17
112 processes: 111 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 0.0% user, 1.1% system, 0.0% nice, 98.8% idle
Mem: 517340K av, 483096K used, 4244K free, 273304K shrd, 158924K buff
Swap: 104380K av, 0K used, 104380K free 153544K cached

Thanks for any help you can give,
David

[codejockey]

What you are seeing is not necessarily a problem, although it does raise some questions. Note that you have 112 processes running; depending upon what you are using your system for, this could be a lot. For comparison, my system stats are:

53 processes: 49 sleeping, 4 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 11.8% user, 1.7% system, 0.0% nice, 86.3% idle
Mem: 384080K av, 141624K used, 242456K free, 0K shrd, 6636K buffSwap: 0K av, 0K used, 0K free 79988K cached

I am not running a web server or similar on my machine.

I'd investigate what processes are running and make sure that you know that you really intend to have each running. The ps -aux command will give you a good idea of which processes are using the most resources (as will the top command). You also have a large amount of memory shared among processes; this may not be what you intended, depending upon which processes are sharing memory (note that processes typically share text space).

Hope this helps.