Hello

Im running a Debian webserver with apache2/mysql on a Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4500 @ 2.20GHz that has 2GB of ram in it. The problem i have that just after a few hours the server gets 99% memoery usage. the load is 0.01 0.02 0.03 but the memoery is at 1.93 GiB used all the time, why is this ?

Dear razzera,
I am new in linux platform. But as per my suggestion you may run top command. Hope it will help you. All the Best

i have been looking at top for a while before this post and i get

2166 mysql 20 0 226m 26m 5448 S 0 1.3 0:23.49 mysqld
7351 www-data 20 0 202m 11m 3940 S 0 0.6 0:00.44 apache2
2074 bind 20 0 119m 11m 2220 S 0 0.6 0:00.00 named
7335 www-data 20 0 202m 11m 3900 S 0 0.6 0:00.72 apache2
7216 www-data 20 0 202m 11m 3516 S 0 0.6 0:00.58 apache2
7329 www-data 20 0 202m 10m 3416 S 0 0.5 0:00.12 apache2
7311 www-data 20 0 202m 10m 3356 S 0 0.5 0:00.20 apache2


however i wonder why mysql would take so much memoery since the server currently has almost no traffic ??

My suggestion is to install 'htop'

Then when you run htop, you can sort (F5) by memory and you can then view which specific daemon or applications are using up all your memory. Let me know what you find...

this is what htop is telling me

http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/2272/htop.png

why is everyting taking up so much memory ?

Is it possible you are just caching a lot? will clear your cache so you can see how much memory the current running processes are actually using.

THANKS! this cleared the memoery problem. is there some way to make it not cache like that all the time ??

I'm sure there is, but I don't know it. A new thread in the right forum, with a good title will get you a good discussion on the subject. I just made an executable script out of the previous command that I run manually when I need to clear the cache. I'm guessing what you are wanting to do would be in the kernel somewhere.

If this thread is solved, don't forget to mark it as such and if I helped don't forget the thumbs up!

Glad I could help.

Thanks damgar.

Its perfectly normal and correct for Linux to use all the avail memory to cache stuff. Its pointless having RAM installed an not using it. There's loads of qns here on LQ that will tell you the same thing. Do not start fooling with the caching unless

1. you are having performance issues
2. you know what you are doing.

Your screen shot shows you're utilizing 263 MB's of RAM with MySQL, Bind, & Apache running. I can't see what else you have installed but your system is running very light in my opinion unless I am missing something. I can tell you that I have servers that run the same thing on RHEL / CentOS that use 3 times as much as your machine. I wouldn't mess with the cache on the system. Your system looks perfect to me unless I am totally missing something.

-Carlos