[CentOS] Memory reporting...

Mon Jul 6 14:54:23 UTC 2009
John Doe <jdmls at yahoo.com>

Hi,

I have a little question about memory usage...

When I do a free, I get:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:      18482800   18030668     452132          0     683068    9426792
-/+ buffers/cache:    7920808   10561992

But, when I do a ps, mysql is the only process that takes noticable memory; and it is far from 7.9GBs...

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
mysql    28346 36.0 15.6 3241196 2884692 ?     Sl   Jul04 981:19  \_ /usr/libexec/mysqld --basedir=/usr --datadir=/IOL/mysql --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid --skip-external-locking --port=3306 --socket=/IOL/mysql/mysql.sock

Once you removed the buffers and the cached memory from the total used memory... what is left?
Looks like I have "something" (that is not buffers/cached) that takes more than 4GB...
Could it be disk cache or is it included in the cached value?
Any idea?

Thx,
JD