Memory Usage on Linux box does not match up with `free`
- by Chris Lieb
I have a Linux machine that is not running too much in the way of software, but is somehow using 1.7GB of the 2GB of the installed memory. When I run free, I get:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2072616 1979972 92644 0 164876 129740
-/+ buffers/cache: 1685356 387260
Swap: 498004 1632 496372
However, when I run ps aux, the memory usage of all processes only comes out to 295.9MB, which is a far cry from the 1.7GB of memory that free reports as used.
Why is there such a discrepancy?