Why doesn't free memory go down

Why Linux always seems to have so little free memory. Does this indicate some kind of problem in Linux or the application? No.

Someone at work asked (paraphrasing):
I have a process that uses a lot of memory while it's running, so the free memory (shown by free or top) goes right down to 60MB out of 8100MB.
But when the process exits, the free memory doesn't go back up. Why isn't memory released when the process exits?

The short answer is that you should never worry about the amount of free memory on Linux. The kernel attempts to keep this slightly above zero by keeping the cache as large as possible. This is a feature not a bug.

If you are concerned about VM performance then the most useful thing to watch is the page in/out rate, shown by the "bi" and "bo" columns in vmstat. Another useful measure (2.6 only) is the "wa" column, showing the amount of CPU time spent waiting for I/O. "wa" is probably the one you have to worry about most, because it shows CPU cycles that are essentially wasted because VM is too slow.

[root@sbandodk ~]# vmstat
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu------
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st
0 0 0 201800 144024 974952 0 0 41 31 1098 896 14 3 83 1 0

As you said, linux is keeping the free memory into buffer cache, but when there is no process running how come the buffer cache is having 4GB and
how it is released 3GB to free memory.

Disk cache is maintained globally, not per-process. Files can remain in cache even after the process that was using them exited, because they might be used by another process. Freeing the cache would mean discarding cached data. There's no reason to do that until the data is obsolete (e.g. files are deleted) or the memory is needed for some other purpose.

After a while the free memory goes back up again.

Pages only become free when they're evicted to build up the free pool (see below), or when nothing useful can be stored in them. If there are gigabytes of free memory then the main cause is that the kernel doesn't have anything to cache in them.

This can happen when, for example, a file that was cached was deleted, or a filesystem is unmounted: there's no point keeping those pages cached because they can't be accessed. (Note that the kernel can still cache a file which is just unlinked, but still in use by applications.)

A similar case is that an application has allocated a lot of anonymous memory and then either exited or freed the memory. That data is discarded, so the pages are free.

Note that flushing the data to disk makes the pages clean, but not free. They can still be kept in memory in case they're read in the future. ("Clean" means the in-memory page is the same as the on-disk page.)

The guy in the second row asks:
So if Linux tries to keep the cache as large as possible, why is there 60MB free rather than zero?
Wouldn't it be better to cache an additional 60MB?

Linux keeps a little bit of memory free so that it is ready as soon as it needs to allocate more memory. If the extra 60MB was used for cache too then when a new allocation was required, the kernel would have to go through the cache and work out what to evict. Possibly it would need to wait for a page to be written out. This would make allocation slower and more complex. So there is a tradeoff where the page cache is made slightly slower so that allocation can be faster and simpler. The kernel keeps just a few free pages prepared in advance.