Just installed 64-bit Ubuntu Server 10.10 inside as guest in a virtual machine. I'm using VMware Player. The host is 64-bit Windows 7.
The minimum requirements for the Ubuntu server is said to be 128MB RAM. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements
So right after the install, I ran top command and to my surprise it said:
Tasks: 63 total, 1 running, 62 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Mem: 504088k total, 446192k used, 57896k free, 30548k buffers
From what I've read, modern Linux systems buffer memory for performance reasons. But here, only ~30.5MB is used for buffers.
I sorted based on %MEM
and there's nothing that stands out (biggest hogger is at 1.3%). Is it because of the virtualization that the memory is some how pre-allocated and thus shown in the used
field?
EDIT:
free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 492 435 56 0 29 338
-/+ buffers/cache: 67 424
Swap: 563 0 563