top or htop? Which one lies?

[Jonas Norlander]

2009/11/7 Mark Greenwood <fatgerman at ntlworld.com>:
> I hope someone on here can clear this up.
>
> According to top my RAM is as follows:
> 2060580k total,  1866728k used,  (which seems to me to be a ridiculously enormous amount of RAM to run a bare desktop)
> According to htop (which I can't copy and paste)
> 269/2012MB (which seems to me to be a quite miraculously small amount of RAM to run a bare desktop)
>
> Which one lies? And why the mahoosive discrepancy? And why are there never any simple answers in life?
> (you may ignore the 3rd question, I asked the GF that one and she gave me "that look").
>
> Mark

No one lies, it depends on what you count as used memory, i bet that
top is counting buffers and cached files as used memory and htop
don't. You can use the free command to see how much is cached.

/ Jonas