Topic: Free Memory

[Ted]

A couple of weeks ago my SME 7 server started to run slow, not knowing what was wrong and in a hurry to get SWMBO (or at least humored) e-mail up and running I logged in on the physical box itself (could not log in remotely) and demonstrated my mastery of Windows.  I rebooted the server.  It worked, all ran like it should.   In the mean while various things caused me to reboot every week or so (power failures etc) so no problem was noted.  

This morning SWMBO (OALH) could not access her e-mail (POP3), so I logged into the box and rebooted it.  This time however I ran "free" first.

Before reboot:

Total 1025076  Used 1008336 Free 16740 Shared 0 Buffers 548 Cached 10316

-/+ Buffers/cache (used)997472  (free)27604

Swap (total)2031608  (used)1016956  (free)1014652

After Reboot:
Total 1025076 Used 214892 Free 810184 Shard 0 Buffers 20948 Cached 65892

-/+ Buffers/Cach (Used)128052 (Free)897024

Swap (Total)2031608) (used)0 (free)2031608

This evening (about 6hours later) (cut & pasted, format may suffer)

free
             total         used         free       shared      buffers       cached
Mem:       1025076     248652     776424          0      17640      55680
-/+ buffers/cache:     175332     849744
Swap:      2031608        144    2031464

:::::::::::
It looks to me that the server sucked up all memory, then went looking for more. And this caused the slowdown.  Am I right?  If so what causes / can cause the memory leak?  And what can I do to cure it.

Standard SME 7.0 (no, that I recall, contribs added).  One year old Dell Server with SATA drive.

Ted

[Jáder]

Here is mine status after 52 days up.

Code: [Select]


[root@tigre ~]# uptime
 13:46:28 up 52 days,  3:51,  4 users,  load average: 0.04, 0.07, 0.04
[root@tigre ~]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        507436     473480      33956          0     124808     131620
-/+ buffers/cache:     217052     290384
Swap:      1015800      48244     967556
[root@tigre ~]#

(NOTE: you´re seeing this well formated because I put that info between [code] and [/code] )



As you can see I just have 33M of free memory ... that´s because Linux (as any good OS) is using all other available memory as cache.
And this is a good thing! (as far I know!)
If you have a small cache size THAT´S a BAD THING! (again AFIK)

Jáder

[duncan]

Well - you`re eating in to swap - so that`s a problem. Are you running around 100 meg of ram - because thats not really enough.

Ok - I`ve just tried free here - I guess you are running around a gig of ram.

Try top to see whats eating into your memory.