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Re: Weird Memory Leak



On Mon, 11 Oct 1999 09:42:51 +0200 (EET), Ser Lev Arris <aris@actcom.co.il>
wrote:

>Aaaha.
>just noticed that "cached" field on the right when you run top.
>"used" memory minus "cached" does make a number I was longing to see.
>
>can anyone explain what caching means in a nutshell?

In the general case, caching means saving a copy of data previously read from
or written to a slow memory, into faster memory, hoping that this data will be
used again, reducing the access time for this data.

There are many forms of caching, but this is the basic idea.

In the specific case above, Linux caches disk sectors in the main memory, so
that if these disks ectors are needed again, they will be read from memory and
not from the disk.

udi

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