I use Nagios to monitor my systems and occasionally get alerts that I had high memory utilization on some of my machines. But using top and free -m, all I found was confusion.

Until recently, I thought the only way to free up the memory was to reboot the server. When it comes to how OS's manage their memory, it can be kind of unclear for some people.

The reason top and free -m often don't seem to line up is because of the different states of memory. There are two states of used...

Read More