Unaccounted memory usage when running Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a VMware guest

Issue

• What is consuming all of the memory?

• Unable to account for memory usage on a RHEL VMware guest :

  # free
              total      used        free     shared    buffers   cached
  Mem:       7927536    6071588    1855948       0      22428     209132
  -/+ buffers/cache:    5840028    2087508
  Swap:     12582896         92    12582804
  

• System shows high memory usage even though applications are not allocating that much memory :

  # ps aux | tr -s ' ' | awk 'BEGIN{sum=0}{ sum+=$6 }END{print sum}'
  709340