Memory, where's it going?

["Shaun" <mailinglists@unix-scripts.com>]

I have a server with 8GB of RAM thats running 2.6.14.3 with the UML Ska's 3 
Patch.   It seams the system is eating more and more memory everyday but i 
cant seam to figure out where it's going.

I free shows the following...
[root@hostXXX ~]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       8312484    8040500     271984          0     120664    7734420
-/+ buffers/cache:     185416    8127068
Swap:      4192924       2500    4190424

I see that free shows that 7.7GB is cached and i'm not sure why so much is 
cached.

When running through a ps auxf grabbing VSZ and RSS i get the following 
results...

For VSZ...
[root@hostXXX ~]# TOTAL=0;for i in `ps auxf|awk '{print $5}'`;do TOTAL=$(($i 
+ $TOTAL));done;echo $TOTAL
2459016

For RSS...
[root@hostXXX ~]# TOTAL=0;for i in `ps auxf|awk '{print $6}'`;do TOTAL=$(($i 
+ $TOTAL));done;echo $TOTAL
2239188

Anybody have any idea what is going on here?

-- 

~Shaun