The output of 'free -m' shows a large memory usage which is not represented in the output of 'top'

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • On a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system, just after reboot, the output of 'free -m' shows 17GB of memory usage, while the output of 'top' shows no processes consuming large amount of memory.

    # free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         32181      18267      13913          0         42        305
-/+ buffers/cache:      17920      14261
Swap:        24575          0      24575

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4,5,6

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