[CentOS] Memory Usage in Top and System Monitor

[Michael McNulty]

Thanks for the replies.  I checked free and that makes sense to me now.  The only thing I cannot figure out is, if there is all this memory available why would swap space start building?
I started checking all this out because the system slowed to a crawl after I noticed swap space being used which does not make sense to me if there is available memory.

     total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       8301448    7917100     384348          0      59984    6009248
-/+ buffers/cache:    1847868    6453580
Swap:      4128760    1225896    2902864

btw - this is Centos 5.6 box using the PAE kernel.  2.6.18-238.12.1.el5PAE
 		 	   		  
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