RAM space vs swap space

[Rick Rosinski]

I want to free up some ram, and I am not sure how.
Seems that most of my RAM is occupied.
All that I have going is KDE, an xterm, kmail, and ktop (so I can see which
processes are taking up the memory).
Looks like every task takes up at least one megabyte, and some up to 14
megabytes, like Seti@home.  Kmail takes up 9 megabytes by itself.
I know that my video card is taking up 16 MB of memorybecause it is a
Voodoo2000 and it uses 16 MB of RAM for its video.

I ran the "free" command and saw how much ram was occupied by buffers, caches,
shared ram, etc.  Is there a way to minimize the cache sizes? Would that be a
good idea anyway?  Can I control how much memory is "shared"?
I just want some more available ram.  I have 128 MB of ram and with only a
couple of apps open, I have just under 3 MB of ram left.  I am running on
vapor, while all of my major apps (like GIMP) are using the swap space because
there is no ram left.  I would like to be running more on ram, and not the swap
space (which iswearing out my hard drives).

I am running a Slackware system on an AMD K63 / 400.

Any help is appreciated.  Thanks.

Here is a report of my  memory useage

Total =127768.
Used = 124772.
Free = 2996.
Shared = 59380.
Buffers = 7572.
Cache = 48760.
-/+ Buffers/Cache: used 68440   Free 59328.
Swap Total = 136544.
Swap Used = 2248.
Swap Free = 134296.


-- 
Rick Rosinski
http://www.rickrosinski.com
rick@rickrosinski.com