REAL MEMORY is showing VERY HIGH USAGE IS ALARMING

From day 1 our production Virtualmin Server has been showing our 64 Gig memory to be using only around 8 percent with only 5 customers including self.

Without any new customers or changes I have done to the system, this week the REAL MEMORY graphic is showing we are using 51 percent today.. yesterday it was smaller a little bit, around 39 percent!!!

What is going on here?

What can be done about this issue that is disturbing ???

Status: 
Closed (works as designed)

Comments

Howdy -- thanks for contacting us!

It's normal for Linux to try to use available memory for caching and similar, so that may not indicate a problem of any sort.

However, the key is to review the running processes, and see if there's anything out of the ordinary. What is the output of these commands:

uptime
free -m
ps auxw
edwincarroll's picture
Submitted by edwincarroll on Wed, 07/08/2020 - 10:04 Pro Licensee

uptime

10:59:04 up 7 days, 5:23, 1 user, load average: 0.09, 0.07, 0.12

free -m

          total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available

Mem: 64250 1801 19450 3250 42998 58717 Swap: 32255 0 32255

ps auxw

USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND root 1 0.0 0.0 191428 4444 ? Ss Jul01 3:50 /usr/lib/syste$ root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul01 0:00 [kthreadd] root 4 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul01 0:00 [kworker/0:0H] root 6 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul01 0:03 [ksoftirqd/0] root 7 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul01 0:00 [migration/0] root 8 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul01 0:00 [rcu_bh] root 9 0.3 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul01 36:00 [rcu_sched] root 10 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul01 0:00 [lru-add-drain] root 11 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul01 0:01 [watchdog/0] root 12 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul01 0:01 [watchdog/1] root 13 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul01 0:00 [migration/1] root 14 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul01 0:02 [ksoftirqd/1] root 16 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< Jul01 0:00 [kworker/1:0H] root 18 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul01 0:01 [watchdog/2] root 19 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul01 0:00 [migration/2] root 20 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul01 0:04 [ksoftirqd/2]

Yeah I'm not seeing anything unusual there, that "free" output is only showing about 2GB being used for processes (which is actually particularly low), the rest is being used for caching.

That's just Linux trying to be efficient with the spare memory that's not being used at the moment.

So your server is looking good! Those numbers are all safe to ignore.

edwincarroll's picture
Submitted by edwincarroll on Wed, 07/08/2020 - 11:14 Pro Licensee

Status: Active ยป Closed (works as designed)