Lately, while browsing, I often get that the computer comes to a crawl. At the same time I notice memory consumptions of close to 90% by programs/ 10% as cache as indicated by the System Monitor applet in my panel.

Trying to find out which program is slowing down my computer I issue the top command in the terminal, but adding the numbers in the MEM% column there doesn't even come close to 20%.

• What is the cause of this discrepancy?


• What is the correct way to do I find out which program is consuming exessive amounts of memory?

I don't know if this is helpfull information, but for reference, the output of free -m is:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached

Mem:          2993       2935         57          0          3        369

-/+ buffers/cache:       2563        429

Swap:         5809       1514       4295