# Could someone please explain this to me?



## Anon (Mar 4, 2012)

Why is so much memory "intact" (what does that even mean)? Is that normal? Why isn't more memory free?


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## UNIXgod (Mar 4, 2012)

Inact means inactive. Not intact. Also this answer could have been found simply by typing man top() in your console and searching for the term you didn't understand.


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## Uniballer (Mar 4, 2012)

And that "Inact"ive memory is acting as a page cache for recently run programs and libraries so that if those pages are needed again before they are reclaimed then the system will not need to read them (again) from disk.  This can give a big performance boost when starting new processes, so for most systems it is way more useful than lots of "free" memory.


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## DutchDaemon (Mar 5, 2012)

"Unused memory is wasted memory".


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