As pointed out below, quite a lot of that isn't in RAM - see "working set".
replyThere's a common noob complaint about "Linux using all my RAM!" where people are confused about the headline free/buffers numbers. If there's a reasonable chance data could be used again soon it's better to leave it in RAM; if the RAM is needed for something else, the current contents will get paged out. Having a chunk of RAM be genuinely unallocated to anything is doing nothing for you.
Nitpick: What you're describing is the disk cache. If a process requests more memory than is free, the OS will not page out pages used for the cache, it will simply either release them (if they're on the read cache) or flush them (if they're on the write cache).
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