How to free up memory?

Hi Friends,

DB = Oracle 10g
Apps=EBS R12
OS = Linux RHEL 4

My server physical RAM is 4Gb.
At fresh reboot the Memory consumption is 80M only.
When I started DB is goes up to 800Mb memory usage.
When I started Apps is goes up to 2Gb.
But when I shutdown DB and Apps I am expecting is will go back to 80M.
but still the 2Gb is used.
When I startup DB and Apps again the usage goes up to 4Gb.
and when I shutdown both again the 4gb is not released.

How do I resolve this please :(

What is command in Linux that will list all memory usage per module/apps sorted memory size ?

Thanks a lot

"...you should never worry about the amount of free memory on Linux. The kernel attempts to keep this slightly above zero by keeping the cache as large as possible. This is a feature not a bug" (*)

(*) http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/softwar.../free-mem.html

thanks dear, your mean if I have 4GB mem it will used all of it? coz I only see 100M free, maybe If I have 8Gb it will also pre-allocate all?

Anticipating your question I provided a hyperlink, would you mind in reading the target document?

You are so clever dear :D
Can I have the link please? Oh...it is there above, im so blinded


By the way...
I have read something... that "A good DBA is a bad Developer and vice-versa
a good Developer is a bad DBA" What does it mean?

Thanks a lot

If you look into free +- buffers/cache how much free memory do you see? Can you post output of the free command?