Memory buffers

I have a dockstar and a goflex home both running davy's linux 3.3.2 kernel. I moved my USB stick install to the HD on the Goflex, then I used the stick to boot up the dockstar. This seems to work pretty well.

My question is why does the dockstar use so much more buffers? See below from #top :

Dockstar:

top - 11:13:31 up 16 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.03
Tasks:  39 total,   1 running,  38 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.7%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:    125036k total,    91024k used,    34012k free,    69824k buffers
Swap:   952472k total,        0k used,   952472k free,    11312k cached

Goflex:

top - 11:17:26 up 45 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
Tasks:  40 total,   1 running,  39 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.7%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:    125036k total,    20336k used,   104700k free,     1000k buffers
Swap:   538172k total,        0k used,   538172k free,    10400k cached

One has 1000k buffers the other has 69824k buffers. Is there a way to make this more reasonable? Which is correct? or more correct?

Try reboot both boxes and the memory buffers will reset. The Dockstar memory buffer is larger because at one point, you must have been running different programs that require a lot more memory. They are free memory, just buffered because they was used previously. If you subtract the Dockstar buffered memory from the used memory, it'll come out approximately the same as for the GF Home.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/03/2012 03:08PM by bodhi.