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top -d1 displays following SDRAM usage statistics on one of my older machines:

125M Active, 42M Inact, 51M Wired, 17M Cache, 34M Buf, 2720K Free

In total, there is 256MiB of memory installed. According to top manual, Inact is number of inactive bytes and Free is number of free bytes. What is the difference between the two?

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Inactive is memory that was used by processes that are no longer running, but is cached since it may be used again. Free is completely free and ready to use memory.

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