[cobalt-users] Re: Raq550: Memory Usage at 98%

[Bruce Timberlake <bruce@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> One of the Raq550 Servers was acting really slow.  I looked in the GUI Active
> Monitor and looked at Memory Usage.  It was at 98%.  The Raq550 has two 512 MB
> chips for a total of 1 GB of memory.
>
> I rebooted and it is down to 15%.  How do I see what is using memory?  Or what
> programs are running?

Use 'top' to see what's running (and how much CPU it's using).  The 
memory will go down to a small amount "free" through normal caching of 
information. This is a good thing. A UNIX server should usually have 
very little 'free' RAM - do a 'free' command at the commandline and look 
at what's in cache and buffers.  Here's my 512 MB RaQ:

[root /root]# free
          total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:     517104     511000       6104      57292      10600     431988
-/+ buffers/cache:   68412     448692
Swap:    131448          0     131448

The low amount of used RAM on reboot is because the server hasn't yet 
processed and cached enough info... let it run normally and 'used' 
memory will climb to be most of the RAM in the box.

If you're swapping a lot (swap used column above), though, that's bad.

I'd look more for how much CPU time is being used up by some processes 
(in 'top' press P to sort by CPU usage) and fix those problems first...