The ‘temporarily’ used memory is borrowed if available by the linux system to help speed up system performance, otherwise the system would have read from disk more often. Much of this type of memory is shown under the ‘cached’ column. This memory is given up by the linux system if an application need memory.

What is cache in Linux?

Simply put, a cache is a place that buffers memory accesses and may have a copy of the data you are requesting. Usually one thinks of caches (there may be more than one) as being stacked; the CPU is at the top, followed by layers of one or more caches and then the main memory.

What is buff cache in free command?

buff/cache – The combined memory used by the kernel buffers and page cache and slabs. This memory can be reclaimed at any time if needed by the applications. If you want buffers and cache to be displayed in two separate columns, use the -w option.