Weird RAM usage calculations

[BigWeb]

Hi,
I have 32G of RAM.
when i view RAM usage in search tab - i can see roughly 5-6GB is used ,
however on the status TAB i see almost all of it is used .

Could you please explain the logic behind this ? Also what would happen if it goes to 100% of usage - as obviously i have more RAM assigned than i have , and system incorrectly sees the RAM usage .

Thanks

 

[guletz]

Any OS use free RAM for caching(like disk I/O). It is fast to use RAM for metadata search, insted of use the hdd. when a new appl start, some cahe from RAM will be written to the disk, so this appl can have access at the desired RAM.

 

[dcsapak]

do you use zfs ? if yes the ARC can take half of your memory by default
also when you go on the commandline you can use the 'top' tool and sort the processes by %MEM to see which processes need the most ram