While viewing the reports of htop
, I would like to know what the orange/brown 'cached memory' bars actually indicate. Really I'm looking for a more practical explanation of what I'm looking at, rather that pure CS terms. Though I'd like to have both.
When I see a large amount of memory being (having already been?) cached, will that have any effect on system performance? What would normally cause the cached memory to increase so much while the used memory (green) stays pretty low?
Here is a screen capture of an example htop
report.