Memory Utilisation on Red Hat Enterprise linux

[V.Venkatesh_1]

Hello,

I am new to Linux and I have the following question.
When type "free -k" command I noticed almost 95% of memory is utilized. But when I run top or sar I don't see any memory intensive program is running. Is this normal in Linux?

-bash-2.05b$ free -k
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3934208 3874192 60016 0 297980 3384604
-/+ buffers/cache: 191608 3742600
Swap: 16385272 0 16385272
-bash-2.05b$ uname -a

-bash-2.05b$ cat /etc/red*
cat: /etc/redhat-lsb: Is a directory
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon Update 1)
-bash-2.05b$

Thanks in advance...
V.Venkatesh

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

the short answer - yes, it's norman to Linux because kernel uses "free from users" memory for caching/buffering.

For details see Virtual Memory docs:

http://people.redhat.com/nhorman/papers/rhel3_vm.pdf - Understanding Virtual Memory In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3

http://www.phptr.com/title/0131453483 Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager

[you can dw hte book from http://www.informit.com/promotions/promotion.asp?promo=1041]

Rgds,
Vitaly