[BlueOnyx:09953] Re: Memory Usage

[Kevin Anderson]

In Addition to what everyone else here has said, I'll add that if your box is constantly in swap, it'll be having an impact on the performance of every other box that shared disk access with this one.  So adding another 512M or more RAM here won't just benefit the BO server, it'll likely benefit all of your servers, because the overall disk activity will drop, leaving more disk time for the other virtual servers.

My experience is all with VMware.  However, conceptually, they're all the same.  Saving money on RAM will never pay off.  Aim to have all of your servers running with plenty of RAM for their needs (I'd say 2G is a better BO minimum, especially on a virtualized system) because an overloaded disk sybsystem is usually the first and most serious bottleneck you'll have.  It's also the most expensive and least convenient problem to address.

Kev.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew James" <matt at flatcapapps.com>
Sent: Tue, 3/20/2012 7:03pm
To: blueonyx at mail.blueonyx.it
Subject: [BlueOnyx:09844]  Memory Usage

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!

-
Matt James
President
Flat Cap Apps
http://www.flatcapapps.com


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