Over usage of memory on 2.4.16

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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