I'm still a Linux beginner, but for my university project I had to rent a vps.
When I got my vps, free -m shows me that it is already using 175 mb of 2gb. I wanted to ask that is this normal?
googling shows me that a clean install of Ubuntu (server), takes up only 40-50 megs of the ram, but my system is using 175 mb already, and I still haven't done anything on it.
(when I did apt-get update and apt-get upgrade, my usage went up to 230mb, but I think that's normal for the package manager)

I'm running Ubuntu 12.0.4, and here's my free -m:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached

Mem:          2016        203       1813          0         12        155

-/+ buffers/cache:         34       1981

Swap:          509          0        509

and here is my top:
http://pastie.org/8610355

and here is lsmod:

Module                  Size  Used by

psmouse                82769  0 

serio_raw              13031  0 

coretemp               13324  0 

ppdev                  12849  0 

vmw_balloon            12700  0 

microcode              18433  0 

i2c_piix4              13227  0 

vmwgfx                115982  0 

ttm                    76149  1 vmwgfx

drm                   233935  2 vmwgfx,ttm

parport_pc             27612  1 

shpchp                 32265  0 

mac_hid                13077  0 

lp                     17455  0 

parport                40930  3 ppdev,parport_pc,lp

floppy                 60183  0 

e1000                 106020  0 

mptspi                 22474  2 

mptscsih               39532  1 mptspi

mptbase                96852  2 mptspi,mptscsih

Thanks for any help, and clearing some confusions.