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New dedi server - Memory not going below 87%?
| Posted by Tom M, 10-07-2007, 06:10 PM |
| Hello,
I'm wondering if anyone could help me.
I've recently purchased a new dedicated box and am noticing via phpsyinfo that memory is pretty much always around 87% (It was at 97% used today for a good hour and quite often its at 90+%)
This system has a 1GB of ram, and runs DirectAdmin. There are only 4 sites on the server and none of them are busy sites currently.
I've read around and studied a few of the threads here on WHT regarding high memory usage but I am at abit of a loss on the cause here and what I can do.
I found a few commands to run to help try and establish the cause - After running ps aux I noticed:
I ran it again shortly after and:
ps aux | awk '{print $4"\t"$11}' | sort | uniq -c | awk '{print $2" "$1" "$3}' | sort -nr
Top
I don't really understand the results above, I can obviously see the ps aux shows some high percentage of memory used by some processes - But is that meant to be the case? And if not, any ideas on what the problem is?
I'd appreciate if anyone could help shed some light on my problem.
Thanks
Last edited by Tom M; 10-07-2007 at 06:13 PM.
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| Posted by RBBOT, 10-07-2007, 07:29 PM |
| The interesting bit is the top 4 lines of output from "top" above the process list, which you seem to have cut off. If the "cached" value is high percentage of your 1Gb, then it means you probably don't have a problem as it means a big chunk of your memory is used by disk cache, which is a good thing. If you have a large amount of free memory, that means your system does not use very many / very large files, which is very rare.
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| Posted by richwest, 10-07-2007, 08:07 PM |
| Yes, try checking the output of "free -m". That should give you a better idea of how much of your total memory is actually being used by processes, and how much of it is just being used as a cache and could be freed up if necessary.
It looks to me as if you have a lot of Apache threads running which are using quite a bit of RAM, it might be worth checking exactly how that's set up, and if necessary considering an alternative like lighttpd if you're really concerned about memory use.
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| Posted by SparkSupport, 10-08-2007, 05:23 AM |
| Try the command top and then press M to sort the listing memory usage-wise. If the clamd is still there at the first line try stopping clamd and monitor your server again.
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| Posted by Tom M, 10-09-2007, 08:48 PM |
| Thank you for the responses guys.
After killing Clamav to test it, the memory usage dropped to 57%
I had someone take a look over things and its the degree of caching thats bringing the memory usage up - Which isn't a bad thing I guess!
Thanks,
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