erm, most kernels of today are designed after "if you have free memory, that is bad." - thus they try to use up as much ram as possible.. with caches, buffers etc. These algorithms are smart, and takes up what they need, and then eats up everything the operating system allows them to.
So if you only have 128mb ram, it won't kill your machine. Look at this, for instance;
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2012 1995 16 0 31 1270
-/+ buffers/cache: 693 1319
Swap: 5938 0 5937
Out of 2GB of ram, it eats up 1995.. oh my god, this would kill any Amiga! ... no, it wouldn't. It's just using my ram, which is what it's there for. Not using it would sort of be a waste of money.
(right, that table looked so much better in the edit-window..)
