Linux has a supposedly good memory management feature that will use up any “extra” RAM you have to cache stuff. This section of the memory being used is SUPPOSED to be freely available to be taken over by any other process that actually needs it, but unfortunately my Linux (three distros now, Mandriva 32 bit, and Mandriva 64 bit, and Opensuse 11 64 bit) thinks that cache memory is too important to move over for anything else that actually needs it.
Simply run the following command as root and the cache will be cleared out.
sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
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