Cached memory never gets released

[David Ashley]

Linux 2.4.23 on x86, 128M memory available
Free outputs this:
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        119204     109592       9612          0         60      92136
-/+ buffers/cache:      17396     101808
Swap:            0          0          0

The root filesystem is NFS, no hard drives involved.
When I run a simple program that just mallocs memory and fills it with
random data, the kernel kills the process after it has only allocated 8 or
9 megs. The 92136K of cached memory can't get released for some reason.
What is happening?

Thanks very much!
-Dave
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