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Are you questioning why most of your memory is being used?! That's normal.
No. I'm pretty sure it is not normal.
Take a closer look at the numbers:
Quote:
Originally Posted by redhat70
49432916k total,
...
4960840k cached
Cached is just over a tenth of total while buffers is much smaller.
Swap is available but unused indicating not much memory pressure (or maybe indicating someone messed with the swappiness to create this odd situation). But a system with that much ram and just a tenth as cache (with little free) implies significant memory pressure.
I've never heard of anyone allocating 50GB to a VM, but it doesn't hurt to ask: Is this running on a physical machine or a VM? (VM's often do strange things to available memory).
Next you could try
Code:
cat /proc/slabinfo
to see if anything is strange in kernel memory use.
A while back I was working on a C program with a big loop in it and I was careless with my memory management.
In my loop memory was getting allocated, but not freed before going out of scope.
This created the exact same thing in top. Lots of memory that seemed to be allocated somewhere, not in cache or buffers - just used.
Looking down all processes running did not add up anywhere even close to the amount of memory it said was used.
Killing my program (which was an infinite loop) did return my several gigs of missing memory - even though top only said it was using a few meg.
Maybe, if you can, kill any tasks that you know and restart them. Keep an eye on top while you do it.
If its a memory leak like that then you will possibly get memory back suddenly and then it will slowly drain away again.
Sorry if I am off the mark experts. :P Just something I saw once that might be relevant.
Be sure to check the easy things. Your top output does not indicate that you ordered by memory usage. If you haven't already, you might want to do that and see if you get better results. There might be some process way down where you don't see it that is sucking memory.
Within top type 'O' (that's the letter oh), which brings up a list of items you can sort by. Then "n" to order by resident memory usage. Or select "p" or "o" or "q". There are several options you might look at. Might as well be thorough while you are using top to investigate memory usage.
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