Memory Usage in DB Server on Linux OS

Dear Seniors,

Firstly a very very Happy New Year.

I need some clarifications on Memory usage of Oracle database servers.

A Production database on Oracle10G 10.2.0.4 and OS as RHEL 4 Update 5

Result of free - m command at OS level is given below:-

[root@abcdproddb ~]# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 16026 15971 54 0 164 14548
-/+ buffers/cache: 1258 14768
Swap: 32200 448 31751


this DB Server is having 16 GB RAM, only One instance runing.
Free command shows only 54 MB is free and 15.971GB is used.

Can any one help we in driving more meening full output from this:

1. Is this going to hamper DB server performance?
2. Do I need to increase the RAM?
3. What do 'buffers', 'cached' and '-/+ buffers/cache' indicates.?

I read some notes on net, but they were more confusing me.

Waiting for early response

Thanking you

Prthvira

By default Linux tries to use all available memory, this means that most of your memory is used by the filesystem cache