Memory Usage

[loccom]

hi Guys

What is the average memory consumption? Attached is a screenshot of our memory consumtion of our dedicated server. It is quite busy and holds about 5 reasonably busy forums.

We recently did a memoery upgrade of an extra 4 gig and the memory usuage shot up again.

Does a good chunk of the memory get allocated to stuff like mysql? etc etc.

Is it pretty normal to see 70-80% memory used up like in my graph? We are not that affected by this just curious to why the usage is so high.

cheers

[Rubberman]

Use the free command to see what memory is being used by what. Most of your RAM is likely being used as cache, which is how Linux behaves. That speeds up disk I/O considerably most of the time. The OS will give it back for program memory when needed. Unfortunately, your graphical tool doesn't show how much of the used memory is allocated for cache. The free command will do that for you.

[loccom]

Use the free command to see what memory is being used by what. Most of your RAM is likely being used as cache, which is how Linux behaves. That speeds up disk I/O considerably most of the time. The OS will give it back for program memory when needed. Unfortunately, your graphical tool doesn't show how much of the used memory is allocated for cache. The free command will do that for you.

Thanks for the response, Here is the result of this


total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 8306860 7997660 309200 0 53400 3895948
-/+ buffers/cache: 4048312 4258548
Swap: 2040212 72716 1967496


How does that look to you?

[Rubberman]

According to this, it has cached 3895948 Kilobytes (3.9GB) of file data. That is available for system/program memory as needed. So, almost 1/2 of your system memory is still available. IE, don't sweat it. You obviously do a lot of disc I/O, and that much I/O cache will speed up access to frequently used data (like web pages) since it is already in memory and your system will not need to do any physical disc I/O (seek, fetch, copy into RAM) to get to it.

[elija]

It looks OK, not sure why you are getting swap usage though.

Worry when your memory is not being used as it is doing you no good then.