[Gllug] Difference between "buffers" and "cached"?

[John Winters]

I recently put an extra gig of RAM in my server bringing it to 1.5G, for
no better reason than that the motherboard has three memory slots and
512M DIMMs seem to come free with the cornflakes these days.

I tested the new memory with memtest before I booted up and all seems to
be fine.  Very quickly after the system started work I noticed that most
of the memory had been swallowed up as "cached" when viewed in top, and
that's how it seems to stay most of the time.  However, first thing in
the morning I find that more of the memory (say half a gig) is taken up
as "buffers" and only about 350M as "cached".  Then during the day
"cached" drifts up and "buffers" drifts down.

Can anyone explain the difference between "cached" and "buffers" please?

TIA,
John

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