CentOS Memory – Why Available Memory is Less Than Free Memory

The Mem: total figure is the total amount of RAM that can be used by applications. This is the total RAM installed on the system, minus:

• memory reserved by hardware devices (often video memory if the graphics card doesn't have its own RAM);
• memory used by the kernel itself.

That total includes:

• free: memory that is currently used for any purpose;
• shared: a concept that no longer exists. It's left in the output for backward compatibility (there are scripts that parse the output from free). (On current systems you'll typically see nonzero values because shared has been repurposed to show memory that's explicitly shared via a shared memory mechanism. On older systems, it included files mapped by more than one process and shareable memory that remained shared after fork().)
• buffers: memory that is backed by files, and that can be written out to disk if needed;
• cache: memory that is backed by files, and that can be reclaimed at any time (the difference with buffers is that buffers must be saved to disk before they're reused, whereas cache consists of things that can be reloaded from disk);
• used -buffers/cache: memory used by applications (and not paged out to swap).

In a pinch, the system could run without buffers and cache, reserving RAM for applications and systematically performing disk reads and writes without any caching. The -/+ buffers/cache figures indicate the amount of RAM used directly by applications (used column) and the amount of RAM not used by applications (free column).

Although this can vary a lot, a healthy system typically has around half its RAM devoted to applications and half devoted to buffers and cache. Unless you're running a dedicated file server, your system has more RAM than it needs for what you're currently doing. If the free - buffers/cache figure was low, that would indicate a system that doesn't have enough RAM (contrary to a widespread belief, having a lot of memory devoted to buffers and cache is important for system performance, and trying to reserve more memory for applications would make 99.99% of systems slower).

The swap line is straightforward, it shows the amount of swap that's in use (either by applications or for tmpfs storage), and the amount that isn't.

Buffered/cached is RAM that was used by a process - say, Firefox - but the process has ended. But the system doesn't actually need that ram right now, so why flush it out? Someone may want to read that Firefox binary and associated libs back into memory... so it is kept cached in RAM until that RAM is needed by a process OR the Firefox (or whatever) binary is re-launched.

You can test this by rebooting your system, and then after your desktop has fully loaded, etc. start Firefox or Chrome or the Gimp or some other larger app, and time how long it takes. Once it is open, close it. Wait a moment or three, maybe check via ps or other utils that it is really no longer running. Then start the timer and launch it again. Much faster, yes? That is because instead of re-reading the binaries/libs back into RAM it simply re-marks the cached RAM areas as "in use".