Understanding top and memory usage

[Chuck Swiger]

Philip Radford wrote:
[ ... ]
> When using the top command I get the following in regards to memory usage.
> 
> Mem: 223M Active, 970M Inact, 175M Wired, 50M Cache, 112M Buf, 73M Free
> Swap: 3029M Total, 12K Used, 3029M Free
> 
> Can someone advise me which figure relates to actual physical memory 
> which is available. I can't work out if it is the 970M Inact or the 73M 
> Free (i.e. the last figure).

The 73MB free is the amount of completely unused physical RAM available, but 
the system can use memory from the 970MB of inactive if needed to run new 
programs, otherwise that serves as a cache of already-accessed process and 
file data.

-- 
-Chuck