watch -n 5 free -m
provides me with:
Total: 7934
Free:6233
However, my system monitor says I'm using 50-60% just while running Chrome and Spotify? To me it seems a tad high.
I'm on a desktop PC, should not have this high RAM usage. Any way to see which sucks it up?
Best Answer
Be conscious that some system monitors don't factor in cache and buffering. The is where the system transparently uses RAM to store things from disk, to make their second access faster. The cache is automagically reduced in size if you need more RAM. See my
free
output:At a glance it might look like I'm using almost 20GB of RAM, but 14GB of that is cache. It's the second line of values that show the actual system usage 4.5 used and 19.5 free.