Hight memory usage

Hello,
I have the following server config:
Poweredge 1750 2 Xeon at 2.8 ghz with HT
4 gb of ram and 2 SCSI 146GB
OS: Centos 5.2
Virtualmin 3.66.gpl GPL and Webmin 1.450

After an clean install and the server running almost 2 days the memory on the server is very low:

[code:1] free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3994 3671 322 0 230 2980
-/+ buffers/cache: 460 3533
Swap: 9216 4 9212
[/code:1]

I had the same problem on my old server (P4 @ 2.6ghz with 1 GB of ram) but i thought the problem was the ram.

Is this memory usage normal?

Currently i`m hosting 16 sites and the traffic is very low so i don’t think that is the problem.

Any suggestions witch can be the problem?

Thanks.

P.S sorry if i posted in the wrong category.

The short answer is that I think you’re okay – your server is not requiring that much RAM.

The slightly longer answer is check out the “cached” number at the end there – it’s 2900, or nearly 3GB of the 4GB you have in your server.

The Linux kernel tries to be helpful – if it sees that you have a bunch of available memory, it uses to cache data, rather than letting it go unused. If it ever becomes needed – perhaps for a new daemon that you launch – it frees up memory that’s considered “cached” to use for that.

So in essence, I’d view the RAM mentioned there in “cached” as better than free – it’s both available, but temporarily being used to speed things up :slight_smile:
-Eric

Thanks for the answer Eric.
Very helpful :slight_smile:

Thanks again :slight_smile: