Recovering Resources

David L Norris dave at webaugur.com
Sat Jan 3 18:53:48 UTC 2004


On Sat, 2004-01-03 at 12:58, David C. Hart wrote:
> On Wednesday morning I had to reboot our server.

Why, was it malfunctioning somehow?

> Is this behavior normal? Do folks do a scheduled reboot to recover these
> resources or should I just leave it alone?

Leave alone.  Why would it not use all available RAM?  RAM that isn't
used is a waste of resources.

$ free
           total       used       free    shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       514608    291520     223088         0      23740     132800
-/+ buffers/cache:   134980     379628
Swap:     2047744    167612    1880132

Pay attention to your -/+ buffers/cache.  That shows I'm using 134980 KB
for running processes (used - buffers).  That means I have 379628 KB
free for running processes (free + cache).  

If the RAM isn't needed for running processes then it will be used for
cache.  The instant more memory is required for running processes the
cache will be purged of old data.  As RAM sits unused it will begin to
be reused as cache.  For example, I just closed a VMware session which
allocated 256 MB RAM.  Already over 40 MB has been reused as cache.

-- 
 David Norris
  http://www.webaugur.com/dave/
  ICQ - 412039
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