On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, William Warren wrote: > <sigh> i know about the differences between winders and linux. I know that > linux uses memory diffrently. I am not using free..i am using top. Never > mind..the swapping has stopped(as i killed the swap) and am waiting for a > fixed kernel that is promised in RHEL3 U4. Sorry, I probably misinterpreted the question. Don't feel offended. The buffers value top reports are not only the filesystem buffers, but comprise of all kinds of memory temporarily claimed by the kernel (network buffers, raw disk blocks, ...). The cache value is the pagecache without the swapped-in cache. You cannot directly influence both of these values, but you can change the behaviour of the kernel by changing the entries in /proc/sys/vm/ or change the behaviour by stressing the system in various ways. Also nice is the information you get from /proc/meminfo, which explains better how the kernel is behaving and what memory is actively being used. More detailed information you can get in the kernel documentation (filesystem/proc.txt) and man proc. Kind regards, -- dag wieers, dag at wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]