Over usage of memory on 2.4.16

[Wakko Warner]

I used to use 2.2.19 before going to 2.4.16 and I normally noticed I had
about 120mb of memory actually used and about 2-3mb in swap after weeks of
uptime.

This is what 2.4.16 looks like:
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        514248     487444      26804          0      35172     204360
-/+ buffers/cache:     247912     266336
Swap:       131048      44724      86324

Why is 2.4.16 using this much memory after only 5 days uptime?  I never saw
this much with 2.2.19 after 3 weeks of uptime.

I'm not running anything different than I normally do.  a few xterms, X
3.3.6, netscape 4.77, star office 5.2, and a bunch of daemons.

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