ran portsnap last night, just to force it to utilize the memory for something - seemed to work, Cacti is now showing Free, buffers and cache and has recovered somewhat.
going to keep my eye on it for a while.
Code:
last pid: 21065; load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 up 129+20:47:18 11:58:11
92 processes: 1 running, 91 sleeping
CPU states: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 0.4% system, 0.0% interrupt, 99.6% idle
Mem: 60M Active, 650M Inact, 132M Wired, 33M Cache, 111M Buf, 120M Free
Swap: 2012M Total, 2012M Free