Server Guru's. Check out the out from this Linux command
 

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 482580 477572 5008 0 3704 328188
-/+ buffers/cache: 145680 336900
Swap: 1060272 0 1060272

Is 482MB the amount of total RAM installed on the server?

and what does the "cached" column mean?

you can often simlify things like this by giving the command the -h or 'human readable' flag, it will convert bytes to MegaBytes and GigaBytes as necessary

That's 512MB of RAM, cache is a good thing. It means memory which was free instead of being wasted on doing nothing, will be used to store files and other operations that the operating system can retrieve from "cache" or a high speed storage area, rather than compute the operations again, or retrieve from a slow storage area such as a hard drive.

Fixing output for the rest of us...


As said before, that is 512mb.

free -h doesn't work on some systems. Run free -m to display figures in megabytes.