When I do some building of kernel or something, a normal top with just 9 
processes without X reports 307M of 512 Mb free, I saw that the Residual 
memory (RES) for the swapper, reaper, pagedaemon, pciide0:1, ioflush ( PID's 
of 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 ) take up 27M each with the -S system processes option. 
And the active memory is reported as 130-160M , why the discrepancy ? Any 
way to prune that buffering and make it report the currently free memory? 
What do I have to fiddle around with ?

Pasting a top with X running as of right now with -Ss 1
Thanks

load averages:  0.30,  0.21,  0.18                                        
15:23:26
37 processes:  35 sleeping, 1 zombie, 1 on processor
CPU states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  1.0% system,  0.0% interrupt, 99.0% 
idle
Memory: 155M Act, 288K Wired, 300M Free, 1025M Swp free

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE   RES STATE     TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
  443 root       2    0    11M   23M sleep     0:18  3.81%  3.81% XFree86
    6 root      18    0     0K   23M sleep     0:03  0.10%  0.10% ioflush
  484 root       2    0    10M   11M sleep     0:11  0.00%  0.00% opera
  205 root       2    0    80K  544K sleep     0:01  0.00%  0.00% pppoe
  528 root      28    0   172K  824K onproc    0:00  0.00%  0.00% top
  174 root      18    0    56K  596K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% inetd
    3 root      10    0     0K   23M sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% usb0
  461 root      10    0    96K 1060K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% 
asclock-clas
  442 root      10    0    48K  956K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% xinit
  177 root      10    0   220K  600K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% cron
  179 root      10    0   552K  464K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sh
  526 root      10    0   552K  460K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sh
  192 root      10    0   460K  380K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sh
  431 root      10    0   456K  376K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sh
  204 root      10    0   452K  372K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sh
    1 root      10    0   312K  240K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% init
  180 root       3    0    48K  636K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% getty
  182 root       3    0    48K  636K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% getty
  181 root       3    0    48K  636K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% getty
  483 root       3    0   552K  464K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sh
  487 root       2    0    10M   11M sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% opera
  480 root       2    0   900K 2620K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% xterm
  448 root       2    0   568K 1848K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% afterstep
  455 root       2    0   272K 1552K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% Wharf
  463 root       2    0   100K 1516K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% xeyes
  523 root       2    0   284K 1464K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% aterm
  469 root       2    0   252K 1460K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% WinList
  468 root       2    0   216K 1432K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% Pager
  453 root       2    0    68K 1128K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% Animate
  203 root       2    0   216K  876K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% pppd
   92 root       2    0   100K  588K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% syslogd
    2 root      -6    0     0K   23M sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% pciide0:1
    0 root     -18    0     0K   23M sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% swapper
    5 root     -18    0     0K   23M sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% reaper
    4 root     -18    0     0K   23M sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% pagedaemon
    7 root     -18    0     0K   23M sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% aiodoned

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