[BlueOnyx:09845] Re: Memory Usage

[Chris Gebhardt - VIRTBIZ Internet]

Matthew James wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I recently mis-posted the following to the BlueQuartz mailing list 
> rather than BlueOnyx (I'm fairly new to the servers and continue to 
> switch the names in my head).  I apologize for the double-post to those 
> who may subscribe to the old BlueQuartz list as well.
> 
> --
> 
> I'm using a BO server and have found that I'm constantly running up on 
> memory usage notifications from Active Monitor.  Specifically, I'm 
> almost always in a state of heavy or moderate memory usage.
> 
> What I don't understand is why.
> 
> The system overall has 512MB of memory, which I know is not much, 
> however, there's not much running on the box at this time either.
> 
> When I go into /top/, I see the following stats:
> Mem: 509084k total, 426320k used, 82764k free, 8668k buffers
> Swap: 262140k total, 262092k used, 48k free, 212316k cached 
> 
> However, when I look down the list of processes, only spamd is taking up 
> any memory remotely high -- 9.1%.  All other processes are showing less 
> than 1% usage (usually far less).  Also, the load average on this server 
> is almost always below 1, so I'm not sure what the repercussions are for 
> letting it ride with memory warnings like this.  It doesn't appear to be 
> having a noticeable affect on performance, however, right now it's only 
> really being used by a few people.
> 
> I should also note that this server is being run on Linode, so it's not 
> by itself on the box, but as I understand it, the memory should remain 
> stable while the CPU is shared with my other tenants.
> 
> Can anyone shed some light on this for me?  Thanks!

Look at all the Swap that the box is using... it's choking!

512MB RAM for any modern box, esp if you're using any dynamic sites 
(PHP, MySQL) is really quite low.  I would not be surprised to see 
performance hits given the specs.

So now what is happening is you're draining the available RAM and 
swapping memory to an extremely low performance disk (remember, you're 
sharing that disk throughput with however many other users doing 
goodness knows what.)

We charge $10 more per month, but our minimal BlueOnyx VPS has 4 CPU 
units and 1GB RAM and 500GB transfer.  I certainly would not recommend 
more than that, and that is why we don't offer less than that.

-- 
Chris Gebhardt
VIRTBIZ Internet Services
Access, Web Hosting, Colocation, Dedicated
www.virtbiz.com | toll-free (866) 4 VIRTBIZ