Hight memory usage

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#1 Mon, 03/16/2009 - 00:40
sslider999

Hight memory usage

Hello, I have the following server config: Poweredge 1750 2 Xeon at 2.8 ghz with HT 4 gb of ram and 2 SCSI 146GB OS: Centos 5.2 Virtualmin 3.66.gpl GPL and Webmin 1.450

After an clean install and the server running almost 2 days the memory on the server is very low:

[code:1] free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3994 3671 322 0 230 2980 -/+ buffers/cache: 460 3533 Swap: 9216 4 9212 [/code:1]

I had the same problem on my old server (P4 @ 2.6ghz with 1 GB of ram) but i thought the problem was the ram.

Is this memory usage normal?

Currently i`m hosting 16 sites and the traffic is very low so i don't think that is the problem.

Any suggestions witch can be the problem?

Thanks.

P.S sorry if i posted in the wrong category.

Mon, 03/16/2009 - 05:09
andreychek

The short answer is that I think you're okay -- your server is not requiring that much RAM.

The slightly longer answer is check out the "cached" number at the end there -- it's 2900, or nearly 3GB of the 4GB you have in your server.

The Linux kernel tries to be helpful -- if it sees that you have a bunch of available memory, it uses to cache data, rather than letting it go unused. If it ever becomes needed -- perhaps for a new daemon that you launch -- it frees up memory that's considered "cached" to use for that.

So in essence, I'd view the RAM mentioned there in "cached" as better than free -- it's both available, but temporarily being used to speed things up :-)
-Eric

Mon, 03/16/2009 - 07:44 (Reply to #2)
sslider999

Thanks for the answer Eric.
Very helpful :)

Thanks again :)

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