RAM problem

[francx]

Hi!

I have problem with RAM.

On my server at home I running the same installation of ISPConfig 3 as on my VPS.

Can anybody tell me why on VPS is using 952MB/1024MB of RAM at home only 502MB/2048MB of RAM?

[till]

The Linux kernel uses RAM thats available e.g. to cache requests to the harddisk if required. So it's ok when your server uses all ram or when the ram usage on systems with different usage differs even if they have the same software installed. So this does not indicate a problem.

[francx]

Ok, Thank you!

[dclardy]

Originally Posted by francx

Hi!

I have problem with RAM.

On my server at home I running the same installation of ISPConfig 3 as on my VPS.

Can anybody tell me why on VPS is using 952MB/1024MB of RAM at home only 502MB/2048MB of RAM?

Another thing to think about here is the type of virtualizatation that you are using on your VPS? I am guessing that it is OpenVZ. The memory management in the older kernels is not the best. When providers move to the latest kernels with vSwap, this should improve for you. The only issue is that vSwap is not very stable right now.

[sjau]

run:

free -m

this will get a result like this:

 free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         12039      11824        215          0        444       9063
-/+ buffers/cache:       2316       9723
Swap:         3814        122       3692

There's 12GB ram available and 11GB ram are being used. Out of those 11GB ram, 9GB ram is just cache. Meaning that's ram not yet being freed from other applications having made use of it at some point.

As ram can be almost instantly dropped/freed, the linux dogma is: unused ram == wasted ram.