showing less ram than before after fresh install

tysonkiblader

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Jul 14, 2014
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I had ubuntu 15.04 installed but its support ends at january and i dont have that much bandwidth and money to do a upgrade every 9 months so i turned back to 14.04 upgraded it to 14.04.3 but i have a problem now before my machine recognized 5.7 GB of ram but now it sees 5.2 GB of ram i ran a memtest for 30 minutes pass 1 with 0 errors but why is this sudden decrease in recognized memory should i be alarmed ?

#free -m

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 5375 1941 3433 181 62 796
-/+ buffers/cache: 1082 4293
Swap: 975 0 975

#top
top - 12:48:21 up 14 min, 3 users, load average: 0.72, 0.73, 0.45
Tasks: 206 total, 1 running, 204 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
%Cpu(s): 5.4 us, 1.3 sy, 0.0 ni, 93.2 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0
KiB Mem: 5504452 total, 1993312 used, 3511140 free, 64328 buffers
KiB Swap: 999420 total, 0 used, 999420 free. 820112 cached Me

#grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo

MemTotal: 5504452 kB

#vmstat


procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ------cpu-----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st
1 0 0 3392356 65764 863000 0 0 133 28 165 920 6 1 90 3 0
 
You are showing FREE memory, not total physically installed so that's going to change depending on what programs are running.

I'm guessing you have 8GB (2x4GB?) physically installed and Ubuntu is loading up and using between 2GB and 3GB of that.

Memtest will show you how much you have physically installed which might be about 8192MB.