System uses too much memory
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IMPORTANT: Linux manages memory different compared to Windows.
Current Linux kernels (if they were build properly) uses all available memory for required operations .
Very often when program terminates, the memory which was used by one process isn't cleaned, it still stored in buffers.
Thats the reason why you can see lots of memory usage, even if system doesn't do anything.
This isn't bad, because any other process could have same amount of memory (stored data in memory by first process will be overwritten by another process data).
More info: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=175419
How to check general memory usage
free -m
and
top
Explanation about it: http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/Linux%20Memory%20Management.htm
How to find which process uses most memory
ps -auxf | sort -nr -k 4 | head -10