CentOS, where is all my memory gone?
I encountered a rather strange issue on one of MySapients CentOS 5 servers the other day, the server seemed to run fine, without any issues what so ever, but it seem to run very low on memory. In fact it only had 150MB memory available of a total 4GB.
This obviously caused me a bit of a worry, but after some digging around I found the answer, linux is borrowing unused memory to do disk caching. Memory is automatically reassigned when the server needs to allocate memory to other services, in other words there is nothing to worry about.
There is a good site about this describing this functionality in more detail, you can read it at:
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CentOS, where is all my memory gone? | Kristian Lunde | Just linux！
15 Jan 10 at 23:54:11
This had me for a while as well Kristian. We’ve got a Fedora and Cent OS box and the Cent OS freaked me out after checking system resources. It wasn’t in production at the time, but still an eye boggler. That’s a lot of RAM for what was an SSH server at the time
Andrew Waters
16 Jan 10 at 00:09:56
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kristian Lunde, trondhuso. trondhuso said: RT @kristianlunde: RT @kristianlunde CentOS, where is all my memory gone? http://bit.ly/5HLG8X [...]
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16 Jan 10 at 03:46:08